Hey Alex, that’s a great question. Netlify is a service for launching websites using the JAMstack design methodology. That’s kind of a strange word that stands for relying on Javascript, APIs and Markup. What that boils down to is a way of making webpages that are actually completely pre-rendered (static) rather than rendered at the time that a user makes a request to your site (known as dynamically generated sites, which is how Bubble and last gen apps work). It really has nothing to do with Bubble.
However, being the great service that it is, Netlify has a REST API for deploying new websites which means that developers who use it can, and this is key, programmatically bind their applications to any domain name they want. I saw this as a pathway for Bubble users - who do not have programmatic domain name registration capabilities - to obtain exactly that (the output of this is what you would enter into your Namecheap console). My understanding is that Gaimed stumbled upon what I did and decided to try to improve it.
My plugin leverages Netlify’s REST API to essentially iframe your Bubble application into a Netlify application. Gaimed’s approach is to leverage Netlify’s REST API to write URL rerouting rules to achieve the same thing but without iframes. In theory his approach is better since it renders a full website rather than one nested in an iframe (which has SEO and accessibility implications). And I do believe people have found his version to be useful. However, like my plugin, his has its drawbacks as detailed by the numerous bug reports/concerns on this thread.
As I mention in my docs, I introduced this plugin as an imperfect solution to the “I want to serve multiple domains from one Bubble App” problem. This is functionality I’ve wanted for about 3 years now and, seeing that others really want it too, I’m glad that Gaimed and I have been able to provide something that at least partially serves the community. In the end, I think the preferable long term solution is that @Bubble will rejig Bubble to accommodate this without our Netlify hack. Perhap’s our solutions will inspire an easier fix to what they’ve said is a hard problem. But until then, here we shall be