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Gatsby vs Next.js: What are the differences?
Developers describe Gatsby as "Free, open source framework for building blazing fast websites and apps with React". Gatsby lets you build blazing fast sites with your data, whatever the source. Liberate your sites from legacy CMSs and fly into the future. On the other hand, Next.js is detailed as "*A small framework for server-rendered universal JavaScript apps *". Next.js is a minimalistic framework for server-rendered React applications.
Gatsby and Next.js are primarily classified as "Static Site Generators" and "Frameworks (Full Stack)" tools respectively.
"Generated websites are super fast" is the primary reason why developers consider Gatsby over the competitors, whereas "Automatic server rendering and code splitting" was stated as the key factor in picking Next.js.
Gatsby and Next.js are both open source tools. It seems that Next.js with 39.7K GitHub stars and 4.93K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Gatsby with 36.9K GitHub stars and 5.65K GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Gatsby has a broader approval, being mentioned in 66 company stacks & 414 developers stacks; compared to Next.js, which is listed in 118 company stacks and 218 developer stacks.
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.
Pros of Gatsby
- Generated websites are super fast28
- Fast16
- GraphQL15
- Progressive Web Apps generation10
- Easy to connect with lots of CMS via official plugins9
- Reusable components (React)9
- Allows to use markdown files as articles7
- Static-sites5
- All the benefits of a static website + React+GraphQL5
- Images5
- List of starters as base for new project4
- Easy to connect with Drupal via official plugin3
- Open source3
- Gitlab pages integration1
- Incremental Build1
Pros of Next.js
- Automatic server rendering and code splitting51
- Built with React44
- Easy setup34
- TypeScript26
- Universal JavaScript24
- Zero setup22
- Static site generator21
- Just JavaScript12
- Simple deployment12
- Incremental static regeneration12
- Filesystem as an API10
- Frictionless development10
- Everything is a function9
- Well Documented9
- Has many examples and integrations8
- Testing8
- Isomorphic React applications7
- File based routing + hooks built in4
- Deployment2
- SEO1
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Cons of Gatsby
- No ssr7
- Documentation isn't complete.4
- Very slow builds3
- Flash of unstyled content issues2
- For-profit2
- Slow builds2
- Plugin driven development1
- Difficult maintenance1
- Problematic between develop and build commands1
- Too many dependencies1
- Difficult debugging1
Cons of Next.js
- Structure is weak compared to Angular(2+)9