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Table of Content
Blog Summary:
This blog is an in-depth analysis of Next.js Vs React, the two extremely popular web development technologies with unique capabilities. It will guide readers through their advantages and disadvantages, architecture, and special features. In the end, readers will be able to choose which one works best for delivering engaging web experiences.
Table of Content
Whether you’re building a web application for an enterprise or a small startup, your goal is always to build a web app that delivers maximum performance, engaging user experience, and security.
Ultimately, it all comes down to how easily your app can crawl, index, and chart among the top SERPs. This means it has to load fast, fetch and obtain data quickly, and render content by easily handling HTTPS requests.
In the web development landscape, the debate of Next.js vs React has received immense attention. React is a JavaScript-based library that is popular among 3,685,454 US websites, and Next.js is a UI framework that ranked 3rd most popular in 2023.
React can deliver single-page or complex web apps with customizable UI components and is flexible with any backend technology. Next.js renders content on the server before it is rendered in the browser, which is essential for SEO friendliness.
This blog will help you understand the differences between NextJS & React and also choose the best one for your web development project.
Next.js is an open-source framework developed by Vercel for building powerful single-page applications (SPAs). It specifically works with React to build user-friendly static web pages like personal blogs, business portfolio sites, and information sites.
In the battle of React vs. Next.js, Next.js simplifies web development by rendering webpage content on the server instead of the client’s browser. This speeds up page loading and enhances the user experience. Next.js development also enables the pre-generation of each page’s HTML code instead of compiling JavaScript code on the client’s browser.
Since JavaScript rendering with React poses challenges to developers, Next.js solves this issue by providing an abstraction layer to hide complex functionality and display only the essential tasks on the client side. By automatically splitting the code, Next.js loads only the necessary JavaScript for each page.
It can easily integrate with React Hooks, Babel Webpack, and Node.js by determining how the components render and tracking the data changes. AirBnB and Uber are some top examples of using Next.js, which is the perfect choice for building E-commerce applications and landing pages.
Optimize your website’s loading speed with robust frontends and improved user interactions.
Next.js development provides added support for TypeScript, a subset language of JavaScript, and improves code quality. Next.js can easily handle both front-end and back-end development tasks, helping load pages speedily and streamlining the development of a website’s project structure.
Next.js renders full HTML pages on the server before displaying them on the client’s browsers. SSR provides users with a fully formed HTML page rather than a skeletal HTML structure. The pre-rendered HTML is faster to crawl and index, increasing page loading times and also improving search rankings.
Next.js enhances front-end development tasks by efficiently serving both dynamic and static content on pages. Its ability to process and show both dynamic and static content allows pre-building pages at build times. It helps reduce server load and brings versatility by easily switching from one to another.
Next.js provides built-in routing features to determine how a web app will manage and react to URLs and navigation paths to define the rendering logic. Dynamic routing saves time by reducing duplicate code across separate pages, and nested routing organizes the page files within directories. Indexed routing configures the default page to open when a user visits the root URL.
By enhancing and optimizing images, scripts, and fonts, Next.js development improves the core vitals of web development. With the picture optimization feature, images are automatically resized to screen sizes with a built-in loading spinner. These interactive features ensure optimal search engine visibility.
Next.js enables the building of powerful endpoints that securely connect with third-party services. Webhooks provide additional support for handling advanced routing points and user-interface patterns. With serverless API and backend development routes, Next.js allows the handling of various HTTP methods to build powerful backends.
React development is both a library and a framework for building user interfaces. This front-end development technology makes developing complex and large-scale web applications easier. Meta (earlier Facebook) developed it as an open-source JavaScript framework.
Whether your project is a single-page or a multiple-page web application, choose React as the preferred front-end development framework between the debate of React vs Next.js.
Whenever a user clicks something on a page, the entire website reloads, which slows down page loading. With React, the components of a page are the reusable pieces of code that a web page displays. These pieces are either stateless (unchanged due to any event that triggers the internal state) or stateful (change their behavior based on user interactions).
When a web page reloads, React updates only the components that need to be changed within the scope of their “state.” Hence, React allows the freedom to change the workflow by giving more control over how an app reacts to changes.
Top examples include BBC.com, Reddit, and Netflix, as React is a preferred choice for online video streaming platforms and social media channels.
Elevate user engagement with seamless web experiences using reusable UI components.
React’s success is due to its component-based architecture, meaning everything in React is a reusable component. Since the components can easily manage their state and rendering logic, building simple and complex UIs is easier. Also, whenever their state changes, React evaluates the optimal way to update the UI.
An actual Document Object Model (DOM) represents XML and HTML content in a tree structure, making it easier to read each program and document.
However, React has a virtual DOM that acts as another instance of the actual DOM with JavaScript. When a change in any component’s stage occurs, virtual DOM represents that memory and renders the pages faster.
React development offers the feature of a JavaScript extension, JSX, which makes it easier to compile the code to JavaScript. The Babel compiler automatically optimizes the code for better performance. Since writing plain HTML is difficult in React, JSX allows you to write HTML most comfortably, and Babel helps transpile it during runtime.
React is easy to test because it has a rich ecosystem of libraries that enable it to set up automated tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests. Its component-based architecture enables developers to isolate the individual parts to test individual code snippets.
For example, Jest is an in-built testing feature in React developed by Facebook.
With its declarative nature, React uses reusable components, which gives it a strong reason to choose it. It makes building interactive UIs easy by changing the state of its components.
Since React takes care of updating the DOM, developers don’t have to interact directly with it. Hence, designing and debugging UIs is easier by changing the program’s state and seeing how the UI looks at that time.
React apps are extremely easy to scale as the business grows. This library can scale up to thousands of components by integrating with third-party libraries without any hassle.
It is versatile as it covers the “View” part of Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture to integrate with the software development frameworks like Express.js for the backend. This makes it flexible enough to build cross-platform apps with multiple touchpoints.
Next.js development services simplify building complex web applications by allowing developers to create and manage routes efficiently. By generating non-interactive HTML on the server side, Next.js works with React to generate JavaScript on the client side.
On the other hand, the power of React development lies in its lightweight representation of data through virtual DOM, which updates only when changes occur in web page components. This easy data manipulation enables faster and more accessible app debugging.
Here’s a quick comparison between the two before we go in-depth into the next section.
| Particulars | React | Next.js |
|---|---|---|
| Development approach | JavaScript-based UI library | The framework built on top of React |
| Developed by | Meta (earlier Facebook) | Vercel |
| Page loading times | Slower compared to Next.js | Faster than React |
| Configuration and setup | Requires manual setup with create-react-app (CRA) | Streamlined project structure with fewer configuration efforts |
| Optimization features | In-built features like memo function, lazy function | Additional features of code splitting, fonts, and image optimization |
| Routing system | File-based routing system to prefetch routes for instant navigation | No built-in routing tools require third-party libraries like React Router |
| Content rendering | Default rendering for client-side, additional setup for SSR and SSG | In-built support for data fetching during SSR |
| User authentication | Separate functions to handle user login relies on third-party libraries | Built-in support for login functions, TypeScript support for easy integration |
| Hot Module | Support for module to give faster feedback on development processes | Real-time code updates with HMR integration for both client-side and server-side |
| SEO Friendliness | It uses client-side rendering, making SEO indexing tough | Higher SEO visibility due to SSR capabilities |
Minimize the UI development processes with the combined power of Next.js and React.
Both React and Next.js are prominent front-end development frameworks for web development. React offers better performance, but Next.js simplifies the setup configuration. Hence, both excel in their unique areas, contributing to better web user experience. Let’s understand in detail how Next.js and React differ from each other in some key parameters:
Next.js can be quite easy to learn for developers who are already familiar with React. Since Next.js enhances React features like routing and SSR. This means Next.js enables you to build a feature-driven web application with fewer dependencies.
However, React takes more work to learn. At the same time, finding experienced React developers is easier as React works on JavaScript, which is very easy for beginners to learn.
React – 1
Next.js – 1
When we consider a web application’s performance, Next.js scores one over React because it works on SSR. Apps with SSR are lightning fast, as the web content is pre-rendered on the servers at build times before it’s rendered on the client’s browser through a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
React is the opposite of Next.js as it works on client-side rendering. Even though SSR can be integrated with React, it requires manual setup. However, it makes up for what it lacks with its reusable UI components, which break the code into smaller parts and increase the performance.
React – 2
Next.js – 2
One unique thing about Next.js is that it uses React components to build static HTML pages. It enhances apps made with React that serve the content of these static pages quickly on the client side. This means it doesn’t have to rely on JavaScript, scoring one over React.
React works on a virtual DOM to render UI components, which contain code that describes how each one looks and behaves. Since it updates only the components that need to be changed with every click, data manipulation is faster.
React – 3
Next.js – 3
SSG is a useful feature provided by Next.js that can deliver fast performance even under high traffic. Compared to dynamic rendering, which uses a lot of resources and puts a load on the server while rendering for each request, SSG generates HTML in advance. It reduces server load, delivers content faster, and regenerates pages at defined intervals with Incremental Static Generation.
React, on the other hand, doesn’t natively support SSG capabilities. Additional tools and configurations are required for static sites as React renders content dynamically on default. Create-react-app (CRA) can be used with SSG to deliver static content.
React – 3
Next.js – 4
React displays all the metadata using only one URL, is placed between headers, and would need a routing solution. Without proper routing, the metadata views won’t show any changes. Since each piece of content of a web app is found on a single page, it creates hassles for both users and SEO and is, hence, not a good option to choose.
Next.js consists of image optimization and splitting the code into smaller bits for every feature for static sites, which helps increase SEO rankings. Other features include minimized cumulate layout shifts and adding React Server Components (RSC) in Next.js 13, which help streamline the streaming UI components.
React – 3
Next.js – 5
While React doesn’t provide any in-built navigation functionality, React Router can be utilized as a third-party library. With React Router, navigating across different views of UI components becomes easier by keeping both the URL and UI in sync.
Next.js has a file-based routing system. The topmost folder is the root route, which provides two ways to navigate across pages. The prefetching feature preloads a route in the background before users visit the root URL, making navigation in client-side pages faster and smoother.
React – 4
Next.js – 6
React is not easily configurable and requires many third-party libraries to build everything from scratch. Changing setups is difficult if the app is connected to standard CRA, which means you can use only what’s already configured in the CRA read scripts.Next.js simplifies configuring everything through its ready-to-use templates. You can customize the build process and project rules, giving you more flexibility and control.
React – 5
Next.js – 7
The final score for all the points shows that Next.js provides additional features over React and, hence, scores more.
Choosing between Next.js and React will ultimately depend on the problem you’re seeking to solve. If you aim to build a powerful user interface for a large-scale enterprise application, React can supercharge this process with its reusable UI components.
Partnering with a React development company enables better code maintenance by reusing code components easily across the development pipeline. Moreover, you can integrate it with a rich ecosystem of libraries like Redux, Webpack, and React Router.
In contrast, Next.js works perfectly with JAMstack applications (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup). Next.js development services allow you to build API routes for multiple pages, making communication between APIs and app deployment easier. This makes it convenient to scale your small applications by allowing more leeway to accommodate increased site traffic.
To sum up, React was in the web development world before Next.js came into play. So, obviously, the former will have a much larger community now that it was released in 2013. The latter came in 2016 and yet made its mark through easy documentation of “learn by doing” tutorials.
The biggest difference between these two is that React is a library, and Next.js is a framework built on top of it. While one is an extensive JavaScript library for building powerful UIs, the other is an impactful framework that enhances React’s capabilities for building those UIs.
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Jayanti Katariya is the CEO of Moon Technolabs, a fast-growing IT solutions provider, with 18+ years of experience in the industry. Passionate about developing creative apps from a young age, he pursued an engineering degree to further this interest. Under his leadership, Moon Technolabs has helped numerous brands establish their online presence and he has also launched an invoicing software that assists businesses to streamline their financial operations.
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