Gatsby vs Next.js: Which would you choose?
Tags: beginners, discuss, react
Published: 2020-07-22 20:50:37

Hi all! Hope your week has been going well.

Not to beat a dead horse, but I wanted to hear the opinions of the Dev community on Gatsby and Next.js, or really any other static site generators you enjoy/use.

I've been looking to make a food blog for a while now, given my background as a pastry chef, and I haven't quite come to a good conclusion on what to build it with.

At first I was like, no worries I will use my knowledge of React and Rails and make an amazing blog! But after reading a few great articles and hours of late night googling, this didn't seem to be the best route to go.

![to the internet!](https://media.giphy.com/media/Rb6unv0ddpPCo/source.gif)

I don't need all of the functionality and weight of a full backend database, nor do I need to spend hours and hours building out a blog template from scratch when there are plenty of beautiful options out there. At first I was hurt at what I was reading, don't create it myself? 

But after some thought, popular opinion is right, I don't need to reinvent the wheel. I can have plenty of customization using a React "framework" and all of the functionality with much less cost in time.

**So all of that googling led me here: deciding between Gatsby and Next.js.**

I watched this awesome video by Harry Wolff entitled [Gatsby vs. Next.js](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imeAhvbA968). I found it very enlightening and definitely agreed with the tradeoffs he mentions.

I also came across this incredible article by James Bedford entitled [Gatsby vs Next.JS - What, Why and When?](https://dev.to/jameesy/gatsby-vs-next-js-what-why-and-when-4al5). He does an outstanding job of comparing the two and speaking of their best use cases.

If you don't have time to watch the video or read the article, no worries (23 minutes is a lot of time), I've listed my compilation of the tradeoffs below:

Tradeoffs  | Gatsby  | Next.js |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|  Starting off  |  Steep learning curve at entry, difficult to understand plugin structure at first  | Quick and easy out of the box, use of node is more simple to breakdown and understand  |
|  Use of Server | Not necessary  | Needs server  |
|  Scalability | Great for small apps  | Better for large apps  |
|  Documentation | Both have great, well thought out documentation  | Both have great, well thought out documentation |
| Integration | Can easily integrate with CMS, many plugins available | Libraries will need to be added by hand |

I haven't had the pleasure of playing around with Next.js yet, but I did get to mess around a bit with Gatsby and I can definitely confirm that it is very confusing at first. 

Some of my old classmates agreed and even with a base knowledge of React, I felt like it was not very intuitive. I am not giving up on Gatsby, but I do think I will need to take a significant amount of time to fully understand the structure of the "framework".

So with all of this in mind, I'm still not decided on which "framework" to go with. Although I haven't had a great experience with Gatsby so far, my blog won't be a huge application at first and could benefit from some of the plugins.

![I can't decide](https://media.giphy.com/media/3orieODRPlLIuSoptS/source.gif)

I'd love to hear other people's opinions, especially if you have a blog or have used one of these foundations in the past. Even if not, I'd still like to hear your input as there is so much to learn and I'm always excited to see everyone's different experiences.

Thanks in advance for sharing and hope you all have a great rest of your week ☀️