Is Next JS better than React JS

Aakash Sonawane
VirtouStack
2 min readMay 29, 2022

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Both are the most powerful frontend technologies built on JavaScript and its upgraded features. We’ll be looking at Next.js features, how it compares to React, and how it performs as a framework for front-end development.

React JS vs Next JS (Library vs framework)

React JS : It is JavaScript library used to build user interfaces for full stack applications.

Next JS : It is a production framework built on top of Node.js enabling React based web applications functionalities.

Advantages of React JS :

  • Components is nothing but a single piece of code or functional unit to perform an individual action and that can be re-use by the time. So basically, with the help of components, we can speed up the development process by reusing the existing components for different uses.
  • Virtual DOM helps to save time on page reloading and prevent the need to re-generate the DOM for the browser to load.

Disadvantages of React JS :

  • React is just a library specialising in user interface development, so it needs other technologies to build fully functional applications.
  • Routing will require a third party library to allow users to redirect between different pages.

Now let’s see what are the advantages Next JS provides to overcome these limitations that React JS has.

Advantages of Next JS :

  • File-system based routing mechanism helps to resolve routing issues that React has. Because when a file is added to the pages folder, it automatically becomes available as a route in Next JS applications.
  • API support Third-party APIs can expand your project possibilities, and Next.js connects to them easily, helping to create your own API routes.
  • It’s simplifies the process of building a React application for production.

Disadvantages of React JS :

  • Community It is still small, but Next JS is growing by the day as Next.js becomes one of the most popular web building blocks in the coming years. So this problem is going to be resolved in the future.

In conclusion, we can say that is Next JS better than React shouldn’t be the question, but rather if Next.js is a good choice to develop your React application.

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