Definitely, compared to Gatsby, Next is much simpler. At least every time I tried Gatsby, I just had to give up after a few hours because of the complexity and massive amount of boiler plate that you had to stitch up yourself from examples.

I can only second this. Next just works with minimal (or in fact no) config. And their documentation is great.

Bonus: Next's built-in API support makes building quick APIs for your project (and its static/hybrid/dynamic) data loading a breeze. While not suited for everything, at the very least, Next and Airtable can get your POC/MVC/prototype running in a day.

The few times I tried to build something in Gatsby I was bogged down in mediocre documentation and a mountain of (maybe?) necessary plugins. I don't know.

Not sure how to feel about Gatsby's GraphQL-first approach either.

I made a gatsby site about 2 years ago and it has been a nightmare to maintain, the build breaks for random reasons every time I come back to it.

Forcing everything to go through graphql is also a pain and adds an unnecessary indirection that requires a million extra dependencies.

Interesting, just yesterday I migrated a site from react-static to Gatsby (because of a nasty bug that’s been open in react-static for ages, seems to be struggling somewhat for maintenance) because I thought Gatsby looked simpler than next.js, haha.

Perhaps it was just that Gatsby felt closer to react-static’s model and it was more readily apparent how to adapt a react-static site to Gatsby with as few changes as possible, using their createPage api to replace the route config in react-static and bypassing all the GraphQL as described in https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/using-gatsby-without-graphql/ - I didn’t have time to do a detailed comparison of frameworks or rebuild large parts of the site.

I was pleasantly surprised how quick and easy the migration was, took me about 90 mins for a site with about six templates and Gatsby seems to build faster and has a much better ecosystem of plugins etc. I wrote up the process at a high level at https://github.com/react-static/react-static/issues/1203#iss... if anyone is interested in the specifics

Did I understand correctly that next.js isn’t just a static site generator and ideally you have a server side component too? This was what started confusing me in their docs, but perhaps I got the wrong end of the stick.

I’ll have to give next.js a proper look next time I’m building a site from scratch anyway!

OK, ended up migrating another site I manage to next.js as the preview feature is a killer for the site admin, and I have to say I do like it more. It's a bit more work to migrate but I think worth it. Thanks for the recommendation!

Yeah, not everyone needs to play with GraphQL.

If you want simple, you can give Charge a try: https://charge.js.org

It's a dead-simple MD -> HTML generator that uses React for templating. No JS code on the client, unless you import your own scripts.

Oh this is neat, thanks.

In my (quite small) experience, developing with NextJS has been a breeze.

Some time ago I've decided to rewrite a landing page, written in Node + EJS templates + JQuery, using some kind of static generator. I have always heard good things about NextJS as well as Gatsby, but after some exploration I decided to go with NextJS, since Gatsby seemed more complex and better suited for CMS/other complex websites rather than a simple, light landing page.

The developer experience has been amazing. Plus, I've found an awesome library[0] for dealing with i18n, which completely absorbed the pain of dealing with multiple languages: getting SEO right, make links work, and so on.

Plus, pairing NextJS with PReact, brought my pages first-load size down to ~40KB (external resources excluded), which I didn't think it was possible for something built with React.

The only things that I missed from CRA-like apps were environment variables, which have been added with this release, and a good integration with third-party tools like eslint, typescript and prettier. I did not use typescript because it was just overkill for a simple landing, and I'm launching eslint by hand and in the CI, so I really miss how good the integration is when developing a normal React App bootstrapped with CRA (which has all of this awesomeness out of the box).

[0] https://github.com/vinissimus/next-translate

I started building my partner's portfolio with Next and was very pleased with its simplicity.

However I had to switch to Gatsby because of its superior support for responsive images.

With Next I couldn't find a way to cache all the generated variants of images between builds, which made the site take more than 5 minutes to build.

Gatsby ecosystem seems more mature also.

Also check out - https://www.11ty.dev/

Imo, simpler if you don't require dynamic views.

I tried and gave up after an hour or two. If you're a js developer it might be easy, for regular developers I didn't find it simple at all. Would be great if someone had instructions on how to create a simple blog with a nice template.

I'm a React developer and I still found Gatsby to be a massive pain. I looked it at for a day and just moved away to next.js.

Gatsby is a massive pain compared to next.js. I couldn't understand how to do the simplest things in Gatsby. I went from reading next.js docs to deploying my personal blog in 2 days.

Both are overkill for that imo. If you don't do fancy stuff and don't want to be outdated in a year, better use something like Jekyll.

Yes.