Next.js is probably the most enjoyable React framework our team could have picked. The development is an extremely smooth process, the file structure is beautiful and organized, and the speed is no joke. Our work with Next.js comes out much faster than if it was built on pure React or frameworks alike. We were previously developing all of our projects in Meteor before making the switch. We left Meteor due to the slow compiler and website speed. We deploy all of our Next.js projects on Vercel.

As a Frontend Developer I wanted something simple to generate static websites with technology I am familiar with. GatsbyJS was in the stack I am familiar with, does not need any other languages / package managers and allows quick content deployment in pure HTML or Markdown (what you prefer for a project). It also does not require you to understand a theming engine if you need a custom design.

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!

Next and Gatsby come in pretty close when it comes to a lot of the front-end features, with a lot of it in favor of Gatsby. However, Next comes with first-class support for Server-Side-Rendering (SSR), while it's a bit of an afterthought in Gatsby; a lot of Gatsby's features wins are also nullified if you attempt to do SSR.

Ultimately, with Next if you want to get to the same level of polish that a Gatsby site you'll have to put in some hard work. Next is simple enough to get going and does a decent job dealing with SSR, which can be painful to deal with. I don't have first hand experience, but it's probably going to be a lot more painful trying to do SSR in Gatsby.

However, I do think that SSR is the future, for now, and Next provides the best developer experience in that regard.