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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Templating Languages & Extensions
  4. CSS Pre Processors Extensions
  5. Next.js vs PostCSS

Next.js vs PostCSS

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

PostCSS
PostCSS
Stacks2.4K
Followers548
Votes49
GitHub Stars28.9K
Forks1.6K
Next.js
Next.js
Stacks8.0K
Followers5.1K
Votes330
GitHub Stars135.4K
Forks29.7K

Next.js vs PostCSS: What are the differences?

  1. 1. Server-side rendering vs Post-processing: Next.js is a framework that allows for server-side rendering of React applications, meaning that the HTML for a page is generated on the server and sent to the client. On the other hand, PostCSS is a tool that processes CSS files after they have been generated, allowing for transformations such as adding vendor prefixes, minification, and more.

  2. 2. Directly integrated vs External tool: Next.js has built-in support for CSS modules and supports importing CSS files directly into React components, allowing for easy and seamless use of CSS within the application. PostCSS, on the other hand, is an external tool that needs to be configured and set up separately in order to be used with a project.

  3. 3. Styles scoped to components vs Global styles: Next.js encourages the use of CSS modules, which allows styles to be scoped to individual components. This promotes a modular and component-based approach to styling, making it easier to manage and understand the styles within a project. PostCSS, on the other hand, does not inherently provide a solution for scoping styles to components, and styles are typically written globally.

  4. 4. CSS-in-JS vs Traditional CSS: Next.js supports CSS-in-JS libraries like Styled Components or CSS Modules, allowing for a more JavaScript-centric approach to styling where styles are written as JavaScript code. This provides benefits such as better code organization, dynamic styles, and the ability to use JavaScript variables and functions within the styles. PostCSS, on the other hand, follows the traditional CSS syntax with separate CSS files.

  5. 5. Automatic code splitting vs No code splitting: Next.js automatically splits the code based on the pages, allowing for better performance by only loading the code that is necessary for the current page. This improves the initial page load time and reduces the overall bundle size. PostCSS does not provide any built-in code splitting functionality.

  6. 6. Serverless deployment vs Post-build deployment: Next.js allows for serverless deployment using platforms like Vercel, where the application is deployed as serverless functions. This provides benefits such as automatic scaling, easier deployment process, and usage-based pricing. PostCSS does not have any specific deployment features and the deployment process would depend on the overall project setup.

In Summary, Next.js is a framework for server-side rendered React applications with built-in support for CSS modules and CSS-in-JS, automatic code splitting, and serverless deployment. PostCSS, on the other hand, is a tool for post-processing CSS files with a traditional CSS approach and requires separate configuration and setup.

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Advice on PostCSS, Next.js

Yucen
Yucen

Feb 23, 2021

Decided

We choose Next.js for our React framework because it's very minimal and has a very organized file structure. Also, it offers key features like zero setups, automatic server rendering and code splitting, typescript support. Our app requires some loading time to process the video, server-side rendering will allow our website to display faster than client-side rending.

312k views312k
Comments
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
Fronted
Fronted

Nov 23, 2020

Decided

We’re a new startup so we need to be able to deliver quick changes as we find our product market fit. We’ve also got to ensure that we’re moving money safely, and keeping perfect records. The technologies we’ve chosen mix mature but well maintained frameworks like Django, with modern web-first and api-first front ends like GraphQL, NextJS, and Chakra. We use a little Golang sparingly in our backend to ensure that when we interact with financial services, we do so with statically compiled, strongly typed, and strictly limited and reviewed code.

You can read all about it in our linked blog post.

720k views720k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

PostCSS
PostCSS
Next.js
Next.js

PostCSS is a tool for transforming CSS with JS plugins. These plugins can support variables and mixins, transpile future CSS syntax, inline images, and more.

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
28.9K
GitHub Stars
135.4K
GitHub Forks
1.6K
GitHub Forks
29.7K
Stacks
2.4K
Stacks
8.0K
Followers
548
Followers
5.1K
Votes
49
Votes
330
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 21
    The "babel" of CSS
  • 15
    Customizable
  • 8
    Autoprefixer
  • 2
    Variables
  • 1
    CSS MQPacker
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
No integrations available
React
React

What are some alternatives to PostCSS, 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.

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.

Django

Django

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

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.

Sass

Sass

Sass is an extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more. It's translated to well-formatted, standard CSS using the command line tool or a web-framework plugin.

.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.

Symfony

Symfony

It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..

Spring

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.

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