What's the next best alternative? Astro?

What do you get out of Next.js over vanilla React? I've never understood why that ecosystem is so popular.

Anyway though, Astro is lovely, especially for static site generation.

> What do you get out of Next.js over vanilla React?

The biggest problem is that React itself recommends against using Vanilla React.

https://react.dev/learn/creating-a-react-app

> If you want to build a new app or website with React, we recommend starting with a framework.

This, frankly, is insane. The whole point of React was that it was this relatively lightweight UI library you could drop into pretty much any workflow.

The fact that the React docs themselves recommend against using the React library as a library is just mind boggling but also another instance in the long history of React devs being absolutely hostile to their users.

There’s a great deal of value in the “fullstack meta-frameworks” model of things. For one, using the same language on the backend and frontend is underrated feature.

But Next.js is not the only option on the market, so I partially echo your sentiment, not around React SPA vs React fullstack, but around Next.js vs a half dozen better alternatives for the React ecosystem.

> using the same language on the backend and frontend is underrated feature

I agree, but you can definitely do this without SSR or Next.JS. Common examples are tRPC, Zodios, or even just plain fetch calls with shared type definitions.

- https://trpc.io/

- https://www.zodios.org/

Even SSR is pretty easy to do without a framework. Just render the component with react-dom/server and use hydrate on the client.

> using the same language on the backend and frontend is underrated feature.

You don't need a framework for that.

Not everyone wants to build a website from scratch. Most people hate build systems.

Building a React app "from scratch" with Vite is this complicated:

import { defineConfig } from 'vite'

import react from '@vitejs/plugin-react'

export default defineConfig({

  plugins: [react()],

})

Without a doubt. It’s really good.

Express?

Express is not a next.js alternative. It covers a small part of the server-side parts but none of the templating, client, etc.

Besides the standard parts IIRC next.js has stuff for image & font optimization and more.

I really dislike next.js, but saying express is an alternative for most next.js apps is not true.

SvelteKit hands down.