StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Business Tools
  3. UI Components
  4. Javascript UI Libraries
  5. Create React App vs Next.js

Create React App vs Next.js

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Create React App
Create React App
Stacks1.0K
Followers1.0K
Votes4
Next.js
Next.js
Stacks8.0K
Followers5.1K
Votes330
GitHub Stars135.4K
Forks29.7K

Create React App vs Next.js: What are the differences?

Create React App: Create React apps with no build configuration. Create React apps with no build configuration; Next.js: *A small framework for server-rendered universal JavaScript apps *. Next.js is a minimalistic framework for server-rendered React applications.

Create React App can be classified as a tool in the "Javascript UI Libraries" category, while Next.js is grouped under "Frameworks (Full Stack)".

Create React App and Next.js are both open source tools. It seems that Create React App with 69.4K GitHub stars and 15.8K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Next.js with 38.7K GitHub stars and 4.7K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Next.js has a broader approval, being mentioned in 82 company stacks & 69 developers stacks; compared to Create React App, which is listed in 24 company stacks and 67 developer stacks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Create React App, Next.js

Taylor
Taylor

May 5, 2020

Review

Hey guys,

My backend set up is Prisma / GraphQL-Yoga at the moment, and I love it. It's so intuitive to learn and is really neat on the frontend too, however, there were a few gotchas when I was learning! Especially around understanding how it all pieces together (the stack). There isn't a great deal of information out there on exactly how to put into production my set up, which is a backend set up on a Digital Ocean droplet with Prisma/GraphQL Yoga in a Docker Container using Next & Apollo Client on the frontend somewhere else. It's such a niche subject, so I bet only a few hundred people have got a website with this stack in production. Anyway, I wrote a blog post to help those who might need help understanding it. Here it is, hope it helps!

758k views758k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Create React App
Create React App
Next.js
Next.js

Create React apps with no build configuration.

Next.js is a minimalistic framework for server-rendered React applications.

-
Zero setup. Use the filesystem as an API; Only JavaScript. Everything is a function; Automatic server rendering and code splitting; Data fetching is up to the developer; Anticipation is the key to performance; Simple deployment
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
135.4K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
29.7K
Stacks
1.0K
Stacks
8.0K
Followers
1.0K
Followers
5.1K
Votes
4
Votes
330
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 2
    No config, easy to use
  • 2
    Maintained by React core team
Cons
  • 1
    No SSR
Pros
  • 51
    Automatic server rendering and code splitting
  • 44
    Built with React
  • 34
    Easy setup
  • 26
    TypeScript
  • 24
    Universal JavaScript
Cons
  • 9
    Structure is weak compared to Angular(2+)
Integrations
React
React
React
React

What are some alternatives to Create React App, Next.js?

Node.js

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

jQuery

jQuery

jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.

Rails

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

AngularJS

AngularJS

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

Django

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

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.

Laravel

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

.NET

.NET

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

Vue.js

Vue.js

It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase