INTRODUCTION

Even though the web frameworks were already crowded, others have been brought to life by various providers, promising better developers’ experience, faster development, and so on. One of those caught our attention, and we already worked on one of our projects – Astro. Today we will compare Astro vs Next.js. We want to give you a better understanding of their similarities, differences and best use cases.

So, let’s start with a quick description of both of them.

WHAT IS NEXT.JS?

Next.js is a popular framework built upon React created by Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel. It was created in 2016 and since then it improved greatly and become a go-to solution for creating amazing SEO and user-friendly websites and complex web applications among various industries. With each release, its popularity grows. Last year in the Stack Overflow Survey, its position grew from 11th to 6th among the most popular Web Technologies and Frameworks.

We’ve already written a lot about Next.js (as we found it fantastic to work with) so if you want to learn more, check out our previous articles:

• What is Next.js?
• Best examples of Next.js websites
• Pros and cons of Next.js

WHAT IS ASTRO?

Astro is a newer framework and first appeared on the market in 2022. However, since then it has already taken its place among the tech stack of market leaders like Google, Microsoft and Trivago.

It’s a modern web framework dedicated to building fast websites. How it’s different from other frameworks and how has it reached the hearts of devs in such a short time?

• Astro only sends as little JavaScript code as possible to the client. It enables faster loading times, especially for static websites. It achieves this through partial hydration, allowing developers to only send JavaScript for interactive components rather than the entire page.
• It’s framework-agnostic, which allows a web developer to write components in their chosen UI framework (React, Vue, Svelte) within the same project.

SIMILARITIES BETWEEN ASTRO AND NEXT.JS

Both of them were built to optimize the performance of web development and the devs’ ease of use in mind. At their core, they share a responsibility to improve the site speed and SEO with advanced rendering strategies:

Both Next and Astro support Static Site Generation SSG and allow developers to pre-render pages at the built-time
They both also support Server-Side Rendering SSR – rendering web pages on the server and sending a fully rendered HTML to the client

• Next.js is built on React and Astro is framework-agnostic, but they both encourage the use of modern JavaScript frameworks
• Next.js along with Astro aim to improve the developer’s experience and provide features like hot module replacement, fast refresh and a rich set of additional dev tools
• They’re SEO friendly – these frameworks offer features supporting rendering content in a way that’s accessible for both search engine bots and people
• They’re built to optimise performance – Next.js automatically optimizes applications with features like image optimization, automatic code splitting, and more. Astro reduces page load times with its zero-JavaScript by default approach and selective hydration, ensuring that users experience fast, responsive sites.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ASTRO VS NEXT JS

*Development Model and Flexibility in Astro vs Next.js *
As I mentioned above, Astro is framework-agnostic, so it allows you to use components from multiple modern web development frameworks in the same project (or use Astro with any framework you like). And so it gives great flexibility in choosing all suitable tools for the projects. Additionally, the app’s owners are not tied to a single framework.

On the other hand, Next js is a popular React framework and provides a highly integrated development experience for React developers. It uses React’s ecosystem to the fullest and makes it greatly optimized for React-based projects. It simplifies the learning curve for developers who want to use it (or join the project built with Next.js). Additionally, being part of the React ecosystem, Next.js benefits from a huge React community, which accelerates the development and problem-solving process.

*JavaScript Delivery and Hydration in Next.js and Astro *
Astro provides zero-JavaScript by default and prioritizes full-page static generation with partial hydration. What this means, is that JavaScript is sent only for components that really need it (i.e. user-interacted components like dynamic forms or widgets). It improves load times for sites, where interactivity is selectively required.

Next.js uses JavaScript more heavily (due to its React foundation and dedication to building rich, interactive user interfaces). And while it offers capabilities for optimizing JavaScript for delivery, such as automatic code splitting, it typically results in a higher initial JavaScript payload, compared to Astro’s minimal approach.

*Static Data Fetching *
Astro introduced and popularized a new frontend architecture named Islands. That enables developers to build fully static sites that rehydrate chosen interactive components of the client side. Astro’s build-time static data fetching allows for data incorporation into the sites at build time, which reduces client-side requests and improves performance.

Next.js offers several data fetching methods, like getStaticProps and getServerSideProps, which allow for fetching data at build or request time. It provides flexibility in data loading and rendering in the application. This approach is more about providing multiple options to suit different needs rather than optimizing solely for static sites.

*Community and Ecosystem Maturity *
Next.js is a clear winner here, it’s even hard to compare such an established framework with Astro – a very young one.

Next.js benefits from the huge React ecosystem, with a large and active community of active users and experts and a wide range of plugins, integrations, and third-party tools developers over its longer existence. The maturity of Next provides active support for troubleshooting, bug fixing, learning and extending the capabilities of apps.

We need to mention again that Next.js even reached 6th place among the most popular web frameworks and technologies in the annular Stack Overflow report. On Github (in March 2024) it has over 25.5k forks and 119k stars and is downloaded weekly over 6 402 335 times (data from 22nd of March 2024). It’s just extremely popular right now.

On the other side, we have young Astro, which while has an enthusiastic and experienced team behind it, has a small community (compared to Next.js). On GitHub, it has “only” 2.1k forks and 41.5k stars. And, according to npm, its weekly downloads reached over 236 846 (data gained on the 22nd of March 2024. (So, you can simply see, that it’s really hard to compare that to Next’s popularity).

So, it’s possible to find the answer to any issue or question on Next.js. It’s very possible anyone has hit this wall before and can quickly tell you what to do. On the other hand, with Astro, you need to resolve the issue on your own, which is not that bad. It just takes time.

As you can see there are multiple differences between them which can define whether the framework is the right one for your project or not. So now we will go through the best use cases for them to provide you with an even clearer picture.

USE CASES FOR ASTRO

Astro is tailor-made for static websites, such as blogs, documentation sites, and portfolio websites, where performance and SEO are critical while usually requiring only some level of user interaction.

Of course, thanks to its framework-agnostic approach, it may be a better choice for websites that need to integrate third-party UI libraries or components developed in different ecosystems (i.e. during the migration of a few websites built on different frameworks into one).

USE CASES FOR NEXT.JS

Next.js is a clear winner for building dynamic, server-rendered applications, like e-commerce sites, news platforms, and social media apps, where content changes frequently and SEO is important.

It’s also great for projects that require tight integration between the front end and back end, such as custom dashboards, CMS platforms, and web apps with custom server-side logic.

It’s a good choice for e-commerce pages or blogs that receive a lot of comments, thanks to incremental static regeneration. It enables the devs to update static content after the build time without needing to regenerate the entire site.

SO WHICH ONE TO CHOOSE – NEXT.JS VS ASTRO?

We’re extremely attached to Next.js – we have worked on it for years, and even though at first (years ago) preferred Gatsby, we can see now, that Next.js bring much more benefits, has a large community around it and is more popular among our customers now than ever.

On the other hand, we need to admit we’re attracted to Astro, its Islands, its hydration and so on. For us, for now, Next.js is a top framework – it’s mature, has wider libraries, a huge community (and resolving issues is much easier thanks to that) and it’s built upon React – the framework we work daily and we’re highly experienced with. But we can’t underestimate the flexibility and modern form Astro bring to projects, so we added it to our tech stack and we will use it in more projects – that’s for sure!

What about you? Let us know in the comments section!