Next.js vs React: The Difference and Which Framework to Choose
Introduction:
The JavaScript ecosystem is vibrant and constantly evolving, with new tools and frameworks emerging regularly. Among these, React has established itself as a leading library for building user interfaces, thanks to its innovative features and ease of use. However, Next.js, built on top of React, offers additional functionality and advantages. In this article, we'll delve into the distinctions between React and Next.js, exploring their respective strengths and weaknesses.
What is React?
React, developed by Meta, is a powerful UI library designed to create reactive web applications. Unlike traditional approaches that necessitate full page reloads upon data changes, React enables dynamic updates through its virtual DOM and component-based architecture. JSX, a JavaScript syntax extension, simplifies the creation of React elements, enhancing developer productivity. React's one-way data binding ensures efficient data flow and enhances code maintainability.
Advantages of React:
- Easy to Learn: Abundant learning resources and a supportive community make React accessible to developers of all skill levels.
- Reusable Components: React's component-based architecture promotes code reusability and modularity, facilitating the creation of scalable applications.
- Performance Enhancement: Utilizing a virtual DOM, React optimizes rendering efficiency, resulting in faster and more responsive applications.
- SEO Friendliness: React's server-side rendering capabilities enhance SEO by ensuring content visibility to search engines.
- Unit Testing: React's modular structure simplifies unit testing, enabling developers to ensure code quality and reliability.
Disadvantages of React:
- Fast-paced Development: React's rapid evolution may pose challenges for developers in keeping up with updates and changes.
- Complex Documentation: Navigating React's extensive documentation can be daunting, especially for beginners, due to its size and complexity.
- Re-rendering: React's component lifecycle may lead to unnecessary re-renders, impacting performance and efficiency.
What Is Next.js?
Next.js is a light framework built on top of React that makes it easy to create fast, server-rendered websites. It was created by the team at Vercel and has been open-source from the beginning.
Next.js is used by some of the biggest names in the tech industry, including Airbnb, Twitter, and Uber. One of Next.js's key features is its ability to automatically code-split your application, meaning that each page only loads the necessary JavaScript for that page view. This results in faster page loads and an improved user experience.
Another key feature is its seamless integration with React Hooks, allowing you to use stateful components without extra configuration.
Features of Next.js
The following features make Nextjs a cutting-edge tool for developers:
- File system routing
- Server Side rendering
- Static site generator
- Image optimization
- Automatic code splitting
- Type script support
- API route
- Server Actions
File System Routing
Next.js is a JavaScript framework that makes creating routes for your web app easy.
When you add a file to the page’s directory, it is automatically available as a route. This makes it very easy to create complex web apps with many different pages.
In addition, Next.js provides a number of features that make it easy to manage your routes. For example, you can easily specify the order in which your routes are displayed, and you can also specify how your routes are displayed on mobile devices.
As a result, Next.js is an ideal choice for creating web apps with many different pages.
Server-Side Rendering
Next.js supports the rendering of pages on user requests on the server-side by generating a non-interactive HTML, while React uses JSON data and JavaScript instruction to make the page interactive on the client-side.
Static Site Generator
Statically generated web pages are said to be SEO optimized because of their speed, which can make Google rank that page higher. With Next.js supporting static page generation makes it stands out against React.
Image Optimization
The HTML <img> tag has been evolved by the Next.js team with built-in performance to help with picture optimization. To use this feature, the next/image component is imported. With this feature, images automatically resize to the screen size seamlessly, even images from a remote location. This new feature provides developers with an easy way to optimize their images for performance without having to manually resize or compress them.
In addition, the Next.js team has also added a built-in loading spinner that will be displayed while an image is loading, further improving the user experience. With these new features, the Next.js framework continues to be an excellent choice for building high-performance web applications.
Automatic Code Splitting
As your Next.js applications grow bigger, the size of a third-party library, CSS, and JavaScript files or bundles increases. Instead of downloading a large file on page load, these code/scripts can be split into smaller units, and for every feature required, these scripts are downloaded immediately, thereby increasing performance.
What is so intriguing about this is that Next.js does this automatically.
Typescript Support
Typescript is a superset of JavaScript that adds type checking and other features that can help to improve the quality of code. While Typescript is not required for Next.js, it can be a valuable tool for developers looking to improve the quality of their code.
API Route
Next.js provides a built-in way to create your own APIs, called API routes. With API routes, you can create your own endpoints and handle incoming requests however you want. You can use API routes to create a custom backend for your Next.js application or to expose data from your database to the front end. Either way, API routes give you a lot of flexibility in how you build your Next.js application.
Advantages of Next.js
What reasons are there to use Next.js for your next project or even considering to learn it?
Speed
Next.js supports static site generation and server-side rendering. Static generation is fast because all web application pages have been pre-rendered, cached, and served over a CDN.
Server-side rendering is fast as the server handling the request, but on request, these pages are already built on the server rather than being built on the client side.
Less Setup
In Next.js, most features you get come with zero configuration as they are inbuilt. For example, the page routing is where you do not need to write any code to create a route in your app.
Easily Create Your Own Back-End
Easily create your custom back-end functionalities to power your own front-end. This does not affect the size bundle of your client-side application.
Built-In CSS Support
One of the key features of Next.js is its built-in CSS support. This means that developers can include CSS Stylesheets within their Next.js projects without needing to use any additional libraries or tooling. This can be particularly useful for small projects where adding a CSS preprocessor would add unnecessary complexity.
In addition, the built-in CSS support means that developers can take advantage of features such as server-side rendering and code splitting without having to worry about whether their CSS will be properly processed.
WHAT CAN YOU BUILD WITH NEXT.JS?
With Next.js you can build a number of digital products and interfaces such as:
- Web Platform
- Jamstack websites
- MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
- Static websites
- Single web pages
- SaaS products
- eCommerce and retail websites
- Dashboards
- Complex and demanding web applications
- Interactive user interfaces And i love to use it in various projects since it gives us so many possibilities.
Get Inspired by Seeing Websites built in next js here is their showcase Page (opens in a new tab) :