Stack choices: Create React App vs Next.js

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

As a developer, there are many choices to make when building your next application. The rise of serverless technologies allows developers to build and run applications without thinking about servers and this also allows front-end developers to create full-stack applications and build SAAS web apps.

In Stack Choices, we take a closer look at some technologies that can help us to build these types of applications and try to make a good decision on what to use. In the last episodes, I took a look at JavaScript vs TypeScript and React vs Vue vs Angular vs Svelte. This time, let’s take a look at Create React App (CRA) vs Next.js.

CRA is a tool that gives you a massive head start when building React apps. It saves you from time-consuming setup and configuration. You simply run one command and Create React App sets up the tools you need to start your React project. This is great to start focusing on building your application from the start and don’t waste time configuring your webpack etc. But for building performant production-ready applications, you might need a little bit more. You might need serverside-rendering for SEO, or code-splitting to increase performance. You could use a boilerplate that has some features built-in (like React Milkshake), or you can take a look at a framework like Next.js.

Next.js

Next.js is a framework built by Vercel. It’s open-source, based on Node.js and Babel, and it integrates with React to develop single-page applications. It makes Serversside rendering very easy. According to nextjs.org:

With Next.js, server rendering React applications has never been easier, no matter where your data is coming from.

Next.js also supports static exporting, pre-Rendering, and has a lot more nice features like automatic building size optimization, faster dev compilation, and preview mode.

In my opinion, the current version of Nextjs is what React was missing for a long time. It has all the features you need when you build a production-ready application that needs to perform. Also, the docs are nice and it’s becoming more and more popular among front-end developers.

Next.js is really good, but that doesn’t mean you should always go with this framework.