In this episode, Wes and Scott debate Gatsby vs Next — how they compare, the pros and cons of each, why you might chose one over the other for your next project, and more!
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Show Notes
5:07 - Server Side Rendering
- Next.js will render on demand — this allows you to have server rendered pages on demand.
- Think of a blog website — publish a new blog post and it will immediately start working.
- Authenticated pages can be server rendered, and thus, pre-loaded for better performance.
- Gatsby runs at build time only — so you need to have all of your data ready at build time.
- Pro: This makes for very fast page load.
- Con: Large websites can take a long time to build.
- Con: Gatsby can do network fetches from the client, but these lose the benefit of SSR.
- Ease of SSR:
- Next.js requires a complicated document.js file if you are fetching data anywhere other than a page component.
- This will probably get easier with Suspense. Demos are simple, but any real application requires harder config.
- Gatsby is Easy Peeezy!
11:09 - Data
- Next.js is unopinionated. Like React, it doesn’t care where your data comes from.
- Gatsby has a number of “source” plugins which will pull in data from sources — markdown, WordPress, API, file system. Once you have that data sourced, you can query it with GraphQL.
22:50 - Routing and Creating Pages
- Next.js makes you create a page in a pages directory. You can nest these as deep as you like. If you want to pass query params, you must do so with a
?query=string. There are several third-party options for getting around this that require a node server. - Gatsby allows you to programmatically create pages with their createPage API.
- For both navigating between pages, they make a Link Component available.
30:49 - Plugins
- In Gatsby, everything goes through the Gatsby pipeline. This makes things like image compression, pagination, sass, service workers and many other progressive web app pieces very easy.
- Gatsby makes building a really good website easy.
- Gatsby Image is SOOOOO amazing.
- The scope of Next.js is much smaller. They give you a few things, but you generally bring your own approach for most things
- Routing
- Linking and prefetching
- Dynamic Importing
38:42 - Deploying and Hosting
- Gatsby is just HTML, CSS, and JS at the end of the day, so it can be deployed almost anywhere — Netlify, Github Pages, cheap PHP hosting, etc.
- Next.js is a Node app. It can be integrated into an existing Express app, or run by itself. Requires a Node server to run it.
- Next.js has a static generation option, but you’re better off using Gatsby for that.
44:41 - The verdict?
- Us Next.js for Apps, Gatsby for Websites
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