The problems with NextJS and why I ditched it, even without
a contender to replace it, just knowing there must be a better solution out there that isn't as bad as NextJS is
Table of contents
What does the user gets when visiting a NextJS powered
website is what matters the most, how much does a company has to invest in delivering those digital products and services comes second, and lastly, the
developer experience
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Well, most of the time the user gets a website, and from that point of view, nothing seems out of place. That's until you zoom out a bit to see more of the bigger picture. For a user to see the freshest content, if the content is static site generated (SSG), a business would have to build every time there is a change, and since NextJS doesn't support incremental static generation, this is totally possible, and the extra cost and effort will be included in the bill, which will be supported by the client. Incremental Static Rendering, is present, how it works is acceptable, except it only works on vercel deployments, good luck getting it to work on other cloud providers or virtual private servers.
Another way is to always use server side rendering (SSR), which comes with its caveats, such as a long time until the user gets to see the content. As the application logic increases in complexity, so do the load times.
Yes Marian, but your forget 'caching', you might say. Thanks for pointing that out, and I agree with you, caching in NextJS has gotten better and better, at least they say that. In the history of NextJS, caching has always been unintuitive and unreliable, always changing the way it behaves from one release to another, chasing documentation and release notes.
In my experience, not every developer is a rock star! And this translates to data not being shown properly, bad user experience while interacting with forms or advanced UI features.
From the company point of view, when you host NextJS
yourself, you have to deal with GIGA sized node modules for a simple app, slow as hell builds, and trying to fix deployment errors as if it's not hosted on
Vercel, I've never met a developer not to experience the nightmare of spending hours, days or more, to fix and adapt the solution that works, except it doesn't.
Back toThe problems with NextJS and why I ditched it, even without
My past NextJS app was building in 5-6 minutes on Vercel, and 10+ minutes on my VPS with Coolify. Well most of my services, one would never successfully deploy on my coolify/vps, build would be ok, just final artifacts not working. I suspect it was more of a coolify problem than NextJS.
To put into perspective, my current solution builds in hundreds of milliseconds, not even a seconds, that's 1000x faster give or take. This means faster iterations, and orders of magnitude much lower bills for a company!
One of the cleanest ways is to just export the website, but
then you lose more than half of the NextJS tooling, as they mention it in their documentation, what's supported and what's not when using export, but still have
to work with a bloated solution that feels like a human made out of organ donors from other people or even other creatures.
Back toThe problems with NextJS and why I ditched it, even without
I can go on and on as I have a big list of pros and cons, why you should or shouldn't use NextJS, that I experienced over many years of using this framework.
But there is always a tradeoff you have to accept when working with it, in order to gain anything, you have to give up something else.
My biggest issue was that I wasn't in control of the output, so I can serve my users exactly what they need, not a bit of what they need wrapped in a NextJS bloated heavy cover.
Your next step would be to tell me a story over a coffee,
and tell me what are you aiming to achieve, without thinking of any framework or library, just the pure outcome, and we'll figure out together how to break out
of NextJS chains, and get you the 2026 performance that puts you in front of all your top competitors, connecting with an even larger audience target.
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