In my experience there has been a lot of code-generation and configuration involved with deploying an Amplify application. Additionally, it required a connection to a git provider (at least this used to be the case)
My goal with Serverless UI was to make the experience as simple as possible to get started, while still allowing for integrating more advanced infrastructure as the application grows
Yep! Diving deeper, the @serverlessui/construct package has a few custom constructs to facilitate the deployment. Additionally the @serverless/cli tool parses the project and configures a CDK App to synthesize and deploy.
Overall, it saves the manual setup and pre-configures a CDK application without any config for the end-user!
Good question! This is meant to be a "zero-config" utility rather than a generic framework. Under the hood, Serverless UI uses the AWS CDK to build a CloudFormation template with a few assumptions built-in (eg. deploying a static UI, anything in /functions becomes an endpoint, etc).
As far as features go, it more closely aligns to Netlify, but with direct AWS integration.