1. With Netlify you don't need to install any command line tool. For non-technical users it's a must.

2. Netlify is a CDN, so "dragging and dropping" would be equivalent to setting up S3 + Cloudfront.

3. You have to create the bucket before running this command. With Netlify you just drag and drop and it takes a couple seconds (if the site is small enough to be built that fast).

4. Netlify is also able to run a build phase before deploying. With S3 you have to do it locally or setup a remote machine.

npm install netlify-cli -g

The big win for me, and the reason I use Netlify, is that it gives you atomic deploys without any effort. `aws s3 sync` works fine in most cases, but its not atomic, so if you want to make sure what you're deploying is going to work for 100% of users all the time you end up having to build something more complex - at the simplest that involves adding a hash to all your files, making sure they're deployed, and only then pushing index.html (and any other entrypoints).

With Netlify I can just hook it up to Github and they'll handle running any build scripts, and then smoothly flip from the previous version to the new one in single action.

Usability is a killer feature. It’s possible to build a website without understanding how to use the command line. I know I managed it when I was younger!

It's just as easy with Netlify's tool too

netlifyctl deploy --publish-directory local/ --site-id site_id

You're missing out on the brave new future! netlifyctl is dormant, upgrade to netlify-cli: https://github.com/netlify/cli

seems to be similar, but with some nice add-on features for not that much.