HACKER Q&A
📣 ritchiea

Have you abandoned Next.js for another front end framework/library?


I'm starting a new project as a technical lead. The last React app I built from scratch was as a freelancer using Next.js. Generally my experience with Next.js has been positive, but while I can still debate my options I'm wondering if anyone has run into problems that caused you to move away from Next.js? And if so can you please tell me about them.


  👤 CraftThatBlock Accepted Answer ✓
Next has been improving very much recently, and would definitely be my number one choice for the vast majority of React projects. What is making you look for other solutions?

👤 arkanciscan
Never choose a tool before you've seen the job. If you need the things Next does, use it. If you don't, don't use it. Just dragging whichever tools you've recently used into your next project is how some of the worst projects I've seen got built. There are many valid solutions to any problem in web dev, and they ALL have tradeoffs.

👤 jeffbarg
Very few downsides to Next.js generally. I’d say for smaller projects I really love leveraging Gatsby’s plugin system (specifically the image transforms), but it’s not as useful for anything dynamic where Next.js comes out ahead.

👤 gremlinsinc
I've been looking more and more at liveviews as a better option maybe?

Laravel livewire/phoenix liveview.

Anyone know how these compare w/ nextjs/nuxtjs in terms of performance?


👤 sdevonoes
Why put another layer of complexity (and dependencies) on top of a solid and battle-tested library like React? Chances are that Next.js will be obsolete in 1-2 years while React will be even better and maintained (probably React will die in 5 to 10 years, just like any other lib/framework).

👤 gas9S9zw3P9c
I generally like next.js, but I have since built some things in Svelte [0] and prefer it for simple projects. Not dealing with JSX and complex React components is refreshing. It just works. There are some upsides to its static generation (with sapper) as well - it can create static pages for things that would need API routes in Next.

TLDR; For large projects that must make use of the React ecosystem I'd take Next. For smaller SPA projects I prefer svelte.

[0] https://svelte.dev/


👤 citrusx
We chose to roll our own SSR, in an otherwise "normal" react + apollo app. This meant that, if we ran into bugs, that we weren't reliant on someone else to update an ecosystem to get unblocked.

It's worked out very well for us.


👤 jaeming
I set up a react project recently using parcel, typescript, reach-router, and emotion css. I was surprised how easy and painless it was. In saying that, Next provides good value to a team with it's conventions and workflow.

👤 _fat_santa
I would take a look at Gatsby. NextJS has had some major updates recently so It would be good to give it another look as well. I personally switched from Next to Gatsby and the main reason is Gatsby's GraphQL API which is fantastic.