Alternatives to Next.js logo

Alternatives to Next.js

Create React App, Gatsby, Hexo, LoopBack, and React are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Next.js.
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What is Next.js and what are its top alternatives?

Next.js is a popular React framework used for building server-rendered applications. Its key features include server-side rendering, static site generation, automatic code splitting, fast refresh, and TypeScript support. However, some limitations of Next.js include a steeper learning curve, potential performance issues with large-scale applications, and limited flexibility for customization.

  1. Gatsby: Gatsby is a static site generator that uses React for building fast websites and web applications. Key features include performance optimization, SEO-friendly, and a wide range of plugins. Pros: Excellent performance, large ecosystem of plugins. Cons: Limited dynamic content support.
  2. Nuxt.js: Nuxt.js is a Vue.js framework for building server-side rendered applications. Key features include automatic code splitting, server-side rendering, and static site generation. Pros: Easy to get started, powerful routing system. Cons: Limited TypeScript support.
  3. VuePress: VuePress is a static site generator specifically designed for Vue.js applications. It offers features like Markdown-based content, theming support, and built-in SEO optimization. Pros: Easy documentation setup, great performance. Cons: Limited customization options.
  4. Sapper: Sapper is a framework for building server-rendered web applications using Svelte. It provides features like server-side rendering, code splitting, and automatic prefetching. Pros: Fast performance, seamless integration with Svelte. Cons: Smaller community compared to other frameworks.
  5. Angular Universal: Angular Universal is a framework for building server-side rendered Angular applications. It offers features like server-side rendering, pre-rendering, and state transfer. Pros: Seamless integration with Angular, improved SEO. Cons: Steeper learning curve compared to other frameworks.
  6. Gridsome: Gridsome is a Vue.js framework for building static websites with GraphQL support. Key features include automatic page generation, data sourcing from various CMSs, and performance optimization. Pros: Great performance, flexible data sourcing options. Cons: Limited server-side rendering capabilities.
  7. SvelteKit: SvelteKit is a framework for building web applications using Svelte. It offers features like server-side rendering, file-based routing, and preloading. Pros: Easy to get started, excellent performance. Cons: Still in beta stage, may have some bugs or limitations.
  8. Scully: Scully is a static site generator for Angular applications that enables server-side rendering for better performance and SEO optimization. Key features include incremental static site generation, lazy loading, and Angular integration. Pros: Improved performance, SEO benefits. Cons: Limited community support compared to other frameworks.
  9. Hugo: Hugo is a static site generator written in Go that is known for its speed and flexibility. It offers features like fast rendering, shortcodes, and multilingual support. Pros: Blazing fast performance, flexibility in customization. Cons: Limited dynamic content handling, steep learning curve for beginners.
  10. Scully: Scully is a static site generator for Angular applications that enables server-side rendering for better performance and SEO optimization. Key features include incremental static site generation, lazy loading, and Angular integration. Pros: Improved performance, SEO benefits. Cons: Limited community support compared to other frameworks.

Top Alternatives to Next.js

  • Create React App
    Create React App

    Create React apps with no build configuration.

  • Gatsby
    Gatsby

    Gatsby lets you build blazing fast sites with your data, whatever the source. Liberate your sites from legacy CMSs and fly into the future. ...

  • Hexo
    Hexo

    Hexo is a fast, simple and powerful blog framework. It parses your posts with Markdown or other render engine and generates static files with the beautiful theme. All of these just take seconds. ...

  • LoopBack
    LoopBack

    A highly-extensible, open-source Node.js framework that enables you to create dynamic end-to-end REST APIs with little or no coding. Connect to multiple data sources, write business logic in Node.js, glue on top of your existing services and data, connect using JS, iOS & Android SDKs. ...

  • React
    React

    Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project. ...

  • Angular Universal
    Angular Universal

    It executes on the server, generating static application pages that later get bootstrapped on the client. This means that the application generally renders more quickly, giving users a chance to view the application layout before it becomes fully interactive. ...

  • React Router
    React Router

    React Router is a complete routing solution designed specifically for React.js. It painlessly synchronizes the components of your application with the URL, with first-class support for nesting, transitions, and server side rendering. ...

  • Hugo
    Hugo

    Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. It is optimized for speed, easy use and configurability. Hugo takes a directory with content and templates and renders them into a full html website. Hugo makes use of markdown files with front matter for meta data. ...

Next.js alternatives & related posts

Create React App logo

Create React App

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Create React apps with no build configuration
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PROS OF CREATE REACT APP
  • 2
    No config, easy to use
  • 2
    Maintained by React core team
CONS OF CREATE REACT APP
  • 1
    No SSR

related Create React App posts

Adebayo Akinlaja
Engineering Manager at Andela · | 30 upvotes · 3.3M views

I picked up an idea to develop and it was no brainer I had to go with React for the frontend. I was faced with challenges when it came to what component framework to use. I had worked extensively with Material-UI but I needed something different that would offer me wider range of well customized components (I became pretty slow at styling). I brought in Evergreen after several sampling and reads online but again, after several prototype development against Evergreen—since I was using TypeScript and I had to import custom Type, it felt exhaustive. After I validated Evergreen with the designs of the idea I was developing, I also noticed I might have to do a lot of styling. I later stumbled on Material Kit, the one specifically made for React . It was promising with beautifully crafted components, most of which fits into the designs pages I had on ground.

A major problem of Material Kit for me is it isn't written in TypeScript and there isn't any plans to support its TypeScript version. I rolled up my sleeve and started converting their components to TypeScript and if you'll ask me, I am still on it.

In summary, I used the Create React App with TypeScript support and I am spending some time converting Material Kit to TypeScript before I start developing against it. All of these components are going to be hosted on Bit.

If you feel I am crazy or I have gotten something wrong, I'll be willing to listen to your opinion. Also, if you want to have a share of whatever TypeScript version of Material Kit I end up coming up with, let me know.

See more

I'm working as one of the engineering leads in RunaHR. As our platform is a Saas, we thought It'd be good to have an API (We chose Ruby and Rails for this) and a SPA (built with React and Redux ) connected. We started the SPA with Create React App since It's pretty easy to start.

We use Jest as the testing framework and react-testing-library to test React components. In Rails we make tests using RSpec.

Our main database is PostgreSQL, but we also use MongoDB to store some type of data. We started to use Redis  for cache and other time sensitive operations.

We have a couple of extra projects: One is an Employee app built with React Native and the other is an internal back office dashboard built with Next.js for the client and Python in the backend side.

Since we have different frontend apps we have found useful to have Bit to document visual components and utils in JavaScript.

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Gatsby logo

Gatsby

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Free, open source framework for building blazing fast websites and apps with React
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PROS OF GATSBY
  • 28
    Generated websites are super fast
  • 16
    Fast
  • 15
    GraphQL
  • 10
    Progressive Web Apps generation
  • 9
    Easy to connect with lots of CMS via official plugins
  • 9
    Reusable components (React)
  • 7
    Allows to use markdown files as articles
  • 5
    Static-sites
  • 5
    All the benefits of a static website + React+GraphQL
  • 5
    Images
  • 4
    List of starters as base for new project
  • 3
    Easy to connect with Drupal via official plugin
  • 3
    Open source
  • 1
    Gitlab pages integration
  • 1
    Incremental Build
CONS OF GATSBY
  • 6
    No ssr
  • 3
    Very slow builds
  • 3
    Documentation isn't complete.
  • 2
    For-profit
  • 2
    Slow builds
  • 2
    Flash of unstyled content issues
  • 1
    Problematic between develop and build commands
  • 1
    Difficult debugging
  • 1
    Too many dependencies
  • 1
    Plugin driven development
  • 1
    Difficult maintenance

related Gatsby posts

Johnny Bell

I was building a personal project that I needed to store items in a real time database. I am more comfortable with my Frontend skills than my backend so I didn't want to spend time building out anything in Ruby or Go.

I stumbled on Firebase by #Google, and it was really all I needed. It had realtime data, an area for storing file uploads and best of all for the amount of data I needed it was free!

I built out my application using tools I was familiar with, React for the framework, Redux.js to manage my state across components, and styled-components for the styling.

Now as this was a project I was just working on in my free time for fun I didn't really want to pay for hosting. I did some research and I found Netlify. I had actually seen them at #ReactRally the year before and deployed a Gatsby site to Netlify already.

Netlify was very easy to setup and link to my GitHub account you select a repo and pretty much with very little configuration you have a live site that will deploy every time you push to master.

With the selection of these tools I was able to build out my application, connect it to a realtime database, and deploy to a live environment all with $0 spent.

If you're looking to build out a small app I suggest giving these tools a go as you can get your idea out into the real world for absolutely no cost.

See more
Ronan Levesque
Software engineer at Algolia · | 18 upvotes · 340.7K views

A few months ago we decided to move our whole static website (www.algolia.com) to a new stack. At the time we were using a website generator called Middleman, written in Ruby. As a team of only front-end developers we didn't feel very comfortable with the language itself, and the time it took to build was not satisfying. We decided to move to Gatsby to take advantage of its use of React , as well as its incredibly high performances in terms of build and page rendering.

See more
Hexo logo

Hexo

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A fast, simple & powerful blog framework, powered by Node.js
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PROS OF HEXO
  • 18
    Ease of deployment
  • 13
    Uses NodeJS and npm
  • 12
    Easy GitHub Pages publishing
  • 10
    Powerful templating
  • 7
    Useful tools and plugins
  • 4
    Easy intergrating with js
  • 3
    Open source
  • 3
    Blazing Fast
CONS OF HEXO
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Hexo posts

    LoopBack logo

    LoopBack

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    Build modern API applications that require complex integrations
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    PROS OF LOOPBACK
    • 11
      Need a nodejs ReST-API, DB, AAA, Swagger? Then loopback
    • 9
      Easy Database Migration
    • 6
      Code generator
    • 4
      The future of API's
    • 2
      GraphQL
    • 1
      Typescript
    CONS OF LOOPBACK
    • 7
      Community is slow
    • 1
      Backward compatibility

    related LoopBack posts

    Priit Kaasik
    CTO at Katana Cloud Inventory · | 8 upvotes · 469.6K views

    We undertook the task of building a manufacturing ERP for small branded manufacturers. We needed to build a lot, fast with a small team, and have clear focus on product delivery. We chose JavaScript / Node.js ( React + LoopBack full stack) , Heroku and Heroku Postgres (also Heroku Redis ) . This decision has guided us to picking other key technologies. It has granted us high pace of product delivery and service availability while operating with a small team.

    See more

    We have an existing (Apis only) Rails backend, that by default follows the MVC pattern, (at peaks of 700 requests a second). I am tasked with making the same (read-heavy) application in any JavaScript framework. I was advised to follow the MVC structure. So I am considering these 3 ( Sails.js, LoopBack, NestJS). I get that sails is closest to rails, but that's not particularly a priority.

    See more
    React logo

    React

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    PROS OF REACT
    • 831
      Components
    • 672
      Virtual dom
    • 578
      Performance
    • 508
      Simplicity
    • 442
      Composable
    • 186
      Data flow
    • 166
      Declarative
    • 128
      Isn't an mvc framework
    • 120
      Reactive updates
    • 115
      Explicit app state
    • 50
      JSX
    • 29
      Learn once, write everywhere
    • 22
      Easy to Use
    • 21
      Uni-directional data flow
    • 17
      Works great with Flux Architecture
    • 11
      Great perfomance
    • 10
      Javascript
    • 9
      Built by Facebook
    • 8
      TypeScript support
    • 6
      Server Side Rendering
    • 6
      Speed
    • 5
      Feels like the 90s
    • 5
      Excellent Documentation
    • 5
      Props
    • 5
      Functional
    • 5
      Easy as Lego
    • 5
      Closer to standard JavaScript and HTML than others
    • 5
      Cross-platform
    • 5
      Easy to start
    • 5
      Hooks
    • 5
      Awesome
    • 5
      Scalable
    • 4
      Super easy
    • 4
      Allows creating single page applications
    • 4
      Server side views
    • 4
      Sdfsdfsdf
    • 4
      Start simple
    • 4
      Strong Community
    • 4
      Fancy third party tools
    • 4
      Scales super well
    • 3
      Has arrow functions
    • 3
      Beautiful and Neat Component Management
    • 3
      Just the View of MVC
    • 3
      Simple, easy to reason about and makes you productive
    • 3
      Fast evolving
    • 3
      SSR
    • 3
      Great migration pathway for older systems
    • 3
      Rich ecosystem
    • 3
      Simple
    • 3
      Has functional components
    • 3
      Every decision architecture wise makes sense
    • 3
      Very gentle learning curve
    • 2
      Split your UI into components with one true state
    • 2
      Image upload
    • 2
      Permissively-licensed
    • 2
      Fragments
    • 2
      Sharable
    • 2
      Recharts
    • 2
      HTML-like
    • 1
      React hooks
    • 1
      Datatables
    CONS OF REACT
    • 41
      Requires discipline to keep architecture organized
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      No predefined way to structure your app
    • 29
      Need to be familiar with lots of third party packages
    • 13
      JSX
    • 10
      Not enterprise friendly
    • 6
      One-way binding only
    • 3
      State consistency with backend neglected
    • 3
      Bad Documentation
    • 2
      Error boundary is needed
    • 2
      Paradigms change too fast

    related React posts

    Johnny Bell

    I was building a personal project that I needed to store items in a real time database. I am more comfortable with my Frontend skills than my backend so I didn't want to spend time building out anything in Ruby or Go.

    I stumbled on Firebase by #Google, and it was really all I needed. It had realtime data, an area for storing file uploads and best of all for the amount of data I needed it was free!

    I built out my application using tools I was familiar with, React for the framework, Redux.js to manage my state across components, and styled-components for the styling.

    Now as this was a project I was just working on in my free time for fun I didn't really want to pay for hosting. I did some research and I found Netlify. I had actually seen them at #ReactRally the year before and deployed a Gatsby site to Netlify already.

    Netlify was very easy to setup and link to my GitHub account you select a repo and pretty much with very little configuration you have a live site that will deploy every time you push to master.

    With the selection of these tools I was able to build out my application, connect it to a realtime database, and deploy to a live environment all with $0 spent.

    If you're looking to build out a small app I suggest giving these tools a go as you can get your idea out into the real world for absolutely no cost.

    See more
    Zach Holman

    Oof. I have truly hated JavaScript for a long time. Like, for over twenty years now. Like, since the Clinton administration. It's always been a nightmare to deal with all of the aspects of that silly language.

    But wowza, things have changed. Tooling is just way, way better. I'm primarily web-oriented, and using React and Apollo together the past few years really opened my eyes to building rich apps. And I deeply apologize for using the phrase rich apps; I don't think I've ever said such Enterprisey words before.

    But yeah, things are different now. I still love Rails, and still use it for a lot of apps I build. But it's that silly rich apps phrase that's the problem. Users have way more comprehensive expectations than they did even five years ago, and the JS community does a good job at building tools and tech that tackle the problems of making heavy, complicated UI and frontend work.

    Obviously there's a lot of things happening here, so just saying "JavaScript isn't terrible" might encompass a huge amount of libraries and frameworks. But if you're like me, yeah, give things another shot- I'm somehow not hating on JavaScript anymore and... gulp... I kinda love it.

    See more
    Angular Universal logo

    Angular Universal

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    A technology that renders Angular applications on the server
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    PROS OF ANGULAR UNIVERSAL
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      Typescript
    • 5
      Complete Framework
    • 5
      Server rendering and code splitting
    • 4
      Static site generator
    • 4
      Dynamic rendering
    • 4
      Same existing code base for both SPA and SSR
    • 3
      Easy setup
    • 3
      SEO
    • 1
      Well documented
    CONS OF ANGULAR UNIVERSAL
      Be the first to leave a con

      related Angular Universal posts

      React Router logo

      React Router

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      A complete routing solution for React.js
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      PROS OF REACT ROUTER
      • 14
        Because there's not alternative
      CONS OF REACT ROUTER
        Be the first to leave a con

        related React Router posts

        Ganesa Vijayakumar
        Full Stack Coder | Technical Architect · | 19 upvotes · 5.2M views

        I'm planning to create a web application and also a mobile application to provide a very good shopping experience to the end customers. Shortly, my application will be aggregate the product details from difference sources and giving a clear picture to the user that when and where to buy that product with best in Quality and cost.

        I have planned to develop this in many milestones for adding N number of features and I have picked my first part to complete the core part (aggregate the product details from different sources).

        As per my work experience and knowledge, I have chosen the followings stacks to this mission.

        UI: I would like to develop this application using React, React Router and React Native since I'm a little bit familiar on this and also most importantly these will help on developing both web and mobile apps. In addition, I'm gonna use the stacks JavaScript, jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, Bootstrap wherever required.

        Service: I have planned to use Java as the main business layer language as I have 7+ years of experience on this I believe I can do better work using Java than other languages. In addition, I'm thinking to use the stacks Node.js.

        Database and ORM: I'm gonna pick MySQL as DB and Hibernate as ORM since I have a piece of good knowledge and also work experience on this combination.

        Search Engine: I need to deal with a large amount of product data and it's in-detailed info to provide enough details to end user at the same time I need to focus on the performance area too. so I have decided to use Solr as a search engine for product search and suggestions. In addition, I'm thinking to replace Solr by Elasticsearch once explored/reviewed enough about Elasticsearch.

        Host: As of now, my plan to complete the application with decent features first and deploy it in a free hosting environment like Docker and Heroku and then once it is stable then I have planned to use the AWS products Amazon S3, EC2, Amazon RDS and Amazon Route 53. I'm not sure about Microsoft Azure that what is the specialty in it than Heroku and Amazon EC2 Container Service. Anyhow, I will do explore these once again and pick the best suite one for my requirement once I reached this level.

        Build and Repositories: I have decided to choose Apache Maven and Git as these are my favorites and also so popular on respectively build and repositories.

        Additional Utilities :) - I would like to choose Codacy for code review as their Startup plan will be very helpful to this application. I'm already experienced with Google CheckStyle and SonarQube even I'm looking something on Codacy.

        Happy Coding! Suggestions are welcome! :)

        Thanks, Ganesa

        See more

        I just finished tweaking styles details of my hobby project MovieGeeks (https://moviegeeks.co/): The minimalist Online Movie Catalog

        This time I want to share my thoughts on the Tech-Stack I decided to use on the Frontend: React, React Router, Material-UI and React-Apollo:

        1. React is by far the Front-End "framework" with the biggest community. Some of the newest features like Suspense and Hooks makes it even more awesome and gives you even more power to write clean UI's

        2. Material UI is a very solid and stable set of react components that not only look good, but also are easy to use and customize. This was my first time using this library and I am very happy with the result

        3. React-Apollo in my opinion is the best GraphQL client for a React application. Easy to use and understand and it gives you awesome features out of the box like cache. With libraries like react-apollo-hooks you can even use it with the hooks api which makes the code cleaner and easier to follow.

        Any feedback is much appreciated :)

        See more
        Hugo logo

        Hugo

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        A Fast and Flexible Static Site Generator written in Go
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        PROS OF HUGO
        • 47
          Lightning fast
        • 29
          Single Executable
        • 26
          Easy setup
        • 24
          Great development community
        • 23
          Open source
        • 13
          Write in golang
        • 8
          Not HTML only - JSON, RSS
        • 8
          Hacker mindset
        • 7
          LiveReload built in
        • 4
          Gitlab pages integration
        • 4
          Easy to customize themes
        • 4
          Very fast builds
        • 3
          Well documented
        • 3
          Fast builds
        • 3
          Easy to learn
        CONS OF HUGO
        • 4
          No Plugins/Extensions
        • 2
          Template syntax not friendly
        • 1
          Quick builds

        related Hugo posts

        John-Daniel Trask
        Co-founder & CEO at Raygun · | 19 upvotes · 340.5K views
        Shared insights
        on
        .NET.NETWordPressWordPressHugoHugo
        at

        There’s no doubt WordPress is a great CMS, which is very user friendly. When we started the company, our blog wasn’t really our top priority, and it ended up being hosted on a fairly obscure server within our setup, which didn’t really change much until recently when things become harder to manage and make significant updates.

        As our marketing team increased, the amount of traffic that found us through our content marketing increased. We found ourselves struggling to maintain our Wordpress install given the amount of theme updates, plugins and security patches needing to be applied. Our biggest driver to find an alternative solution however was just how slow Wordpress is at serving content to the end user. I know there will be die hard fans out there with ways to set things up that mean WordPress sites can load quickly, but we needed something a lot more streamlined.

        We could see in our own Real User Monitoring tool that many users were experiencing page load speeds of over five seconds, even longer in worst case scenarios. Hugo is an open source static site generator that has enabled us to reduce load times by over 500% and make our blog far more maintainable across the whole team.

        The Raygun marketing site runs on a .NET CMS called N2 but we plan to swap that out with Hugo as well in future.

        #StaticSiteGenerators #SelfHostedBloggingCms #SupportSalesAndMarketing

        See more
        Josh Dzielak
        Co-Founder & CTO at Orbit · | 5 upvotes · 524.2K views
        Shared insights
        on
        JekyllJekyllHugoHugo

        Earlier this year, I migrated my personal website (dzello.com) from Jekyll to Hugo. My goal with the migration was to make the development environment as pleasant as possible and to make it really easy to add new types of content. For example, I knew I wanted to add a consulting page and some portfolio-style pages to show off talks I had given and projects I had worked on.

        I had heard about how fast Hugo was, so I tried it out with my content after using a simple migration tool. The results were impressive - the startup and rebuild times were in milliseconds, making the process of iterating on content or design less cumbersome. Then I started to see how I could use Hugo to create new page types and was very impressed by the flexibility of the content model. It took me a few days to really understand where content should go with Hugo, but then I felt very confident that I could create many different types of pages - even multiple blogs if I wanted - using a consistent syntax and with full control of the layouts and the URLs.

        After about 6 months, I've been very happy with the results of the migration. The dev environment is light and fast and I feel at ease adding new pages and sections to the site.

        See more