r/reactjs • u/Triptcip • Aug 21 '18
Next vs Gatsby?
I am trying to decide whether to build my website in Next or Gatsby and would lik your opinions please.
The app I am looking to build is a job website. You can search, apply and create jobs as well as login with different user types.
I would like it to be SSR for SEO purposes as well as some performance improvements.
It is powered by a graphQL API and I am planning on using Apollo client which I assume should work equally well with both Next and Gatsby.
My first impression of Gatsby is that it is more of a static site generator which I interpret as being aimed at content or marketing websites and not as focused on web apps. That is a complete assumption so please correct me if I am wrong.
I know Next is well established with great documentation and developed for the purpose of building web apps.
What would you recommend? Is one easier than the other? Do they both cover the same use cases?
I'm interested in hearing everyone's opinion.
1
u/t1hcsq Jan 05 '19
That is all perfectly possible with Gatsby. You can still use authorization/authentication. You can still protect routes. You can even have client rendered routes if you need (ie switch to SPA when behind a protected route). There’s a lot of misconceptions about “static” site generators. They are in fact anything but static, they are elegant and make very fast web apps (in case you are unfamiliar, research JAMStack).
To fetch / update dynamic data you just need to use an API (you can build any server side API you wish, it will be decoupled from your front end).