Comparing Next.js to Other Alternatives
Understand the strengths and differences of Next.js compared to Gatsby, Nuxt.js, Razzle, and Angular Universal. Learn why Next.js stands out for server-side rendering and dynamic full-stack applications.
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As we may be wondering, Next.js is not the only player in the server-side rendered JavaScript world. However, alternatives might be considered depending on the final purpose of a project.
Gatsby
One popular alternative is Gatsby. We may consider this framework if we seek to build static websites. Unlike Next.js, Gatsby only supports static site generation and does it incredibly well. Every page is pre-rendered at build time and can be served on any content delivery network (CDN) as a static asset, allowing the performance to be incredibly competitive compared to dynamically server-side rendered alternatives.
The biggest downside of using Gatsby over Next.js is that we’ll lose the ability of dynamic server-side rendering, which is an important feature for building more dynamically data-driven and complex websites.
Razzle
Less popular than Next.js, Razzle is a tool for creating server-side rendered JavaScript applications. It aims to maintain the ease of use of create-react-app while abstracting all the complex configurations needed for rendering the application both on the server and client sides. The most significant advantage of using Razzle instead of Next.js (or the following alternatives) is that it’s framework agnostic. We can choose our favorite front-end framework (or language), such as React, Vue, Angular, Elm, or Reason-React—it’s our choice.
Nuxt.js
If we have experience with Vue, then Nuxt.js can be a valid Next.js competitor. They offer support for server-side rendering, static site generation, progressive web app management, and so on, with no significant differences in performance, SEO, or development speed. While Nuxt.js and Next.js serve the same purpose, Nuxt.js needs more configuration, which is sometimes not a bad thing.
In our Nuxt.js configuration file, we can define layouts, global plug-ins and components, routes, and so on, while with Next.js, we need to do it the React way. Apart from that, they share many functionalities, but the most significant difference is the library underneath. If we already have a Vue component library, we could consider Nuxt.js for server-side rendering.
Angular Universal
Of course, Angular has also made its move to the JavaScript server-side rendering scene, and it proposes Angular Universal as an official way for server-side rendering of Angular applications. It supports static site generation and server-side rendering, and unlike Nuxt.js and Next.js, it was developed by one of the biggest companies out there: Google. So if we’re into Angular development and already have some components written with that library, Angular Universal can be a natural alternative to Nuxt.js, Next.js, and other similar frameworks.
Why Next.js?
We’ve now seen some popular alternatives to Next.js and their strengths and weaknesses.
The main reason why we suggest using Next.js instead of any other framework is because of its incredible feature set. With Next.js, we get everything we need right out of the box, and we’re not only referring to components, configurations, and deployment options. However, they’re probably the most complete we’ve ever seen.
In addition, Next.js has an incredibly welcoming and active community ready to support us at every step in building our application. This is a huge bonus point because as soon as we have a problem with our code base, we’ll be able to get help from the massive community across many different platforms, including StackOverflow and GitHub, where the Vercel team is also often involved in discussions and support requests.
Now that we know how Next.js competes with other similar frameworks, let’s see the main differences between a default client-side React app and a fully featured server-side environment for rendering our JavaScript code base dynamically for each request and statically at build time.
Moving from React to Next.js
If we already have some experience with React, we’ll find it incredibly easy to build our first Next.js website. Its philosophy is very close to React and provides a convention-over-configuration approach for most of its settings. So if we want to take advantage of a specific Next.js feature, we’ll easily find the official way to do it without any need for complex configurations.
For example, in a single Next.js app, we can specify which pages will be server-side rendered and which will be statically generated at build time without the need to write any configuration files or anything like that. We just have to export a specific function from our page and let Next.js do its magic.
The most significant difference between React and Next.js is that while React is just a JavaScript library, Next.js is a framework for building rich and complete user experiences both on the client and server sides, adding tons of incredibly useful features. Every server-side rendered or statically generated page will run on Node.js, so we’ll lose access to some browser-specific global objects, such as fetch, window, and document, as well as some HTML elements, such as canvas. We’ll always need to keep that in mind when we’re writing our Next.js pages, even if the framework provides its own way of dealing with components that must use such global variables and HTML elements.
On the other hand, there might be times when we want to use Node.js-specific libraries or APIs, such as fs or child_process, and Next.js allows us to use them by running our server-side code on each request or at build time (depending on how we choose to render our pages) before sending the data to the client.
But even if we want to create a client-side rendered app, Next.js can be a great alternative to the well-known create-react-app. Next.js, in fact, can be used as a framework for writing progressive and offline-first web apps with ease, taking advantage of its incredible built-in components and optimizations. So let’s get started with Next.js.