Next.js is a framework for React, and since its initial release five years ago, it has swiftly become one of the most prominent and most-used platforms for app development. It's flexible without being too open-ended, it's easy to learn, and it's designed to work for both server-side and client-side design. There's no wonder that it's among the most widely-used platforms available today.

Not too long ago, we wrote up a rundown of 

the differences between Create-React-App and Next.js

, but it can be tricky to visualize all of that in the abstract. What can Next.js be used for in the real world? Check out these examples of apps made with Next.js.

Regardless of how you feel about cryptocurrencies in general, you can't deny that CoinMarketCap is one of the foremost authorities on all things crypto.

Next.js is great for building a site with static site elements and dynamically-filled data while maintaining a speedy load time. CoinMarketCap loads exceptionally quickly and populates fields with data ranging from coin values to trending coins to a feed of recent video content created by coiners.

The site also uses React (obviously; Next.js is a framework for React) and Node.js for its server-side code. You can see how the combination of technologies gives it a speedy loading time and very responsive design, even though it's drawing in dozens or hundreds of data points from its servers with every page load.

You can change language or currency, even enable/disable dark mode with the click of a button, and watch the page adjust in real-time; no need for a full reload. That's the power of Next.js. For added features, check out the top corner.

TailwindCSS provides a website builder/designer powered primarily with CSS. It's essentially a framework and engine for creating, deploying, maintaining, and building CSS to beautify and design a website. It doesn't do anything CSS doesn't normally do, but it provides a framework and tool to allow you to build it without the hassle of doing everything manually.

Just check out their website for various "live" demos showcasing what it can do.

While we could go on about all of the cool features of TailwindCSS, that's not the point. The point is to examine their website. See how fast it loads? See how easily elements can adapt to changes you make with the click of a button, whether it's part of one of their demos or the toggle between light and dark mode at the top? Those are features of Next.js built into their design.

TailwindCSS is great because it can also use with Next.js to design your own website. They've categorized and optimized CSS uniquely and interestingly, making it much easier to use, easier to implement, and faster than most of the alternatives, including just manually coding CSS.

Next.js is a small, agile, and easy-to-use framework. These features make it perfect for creating quick, small projects, which is why you see it as the basis for a massive array of small-scale sites and proof of concept ideas.

That doesn't mean it's only used by small sites, however.

The truth is, Next.js is used by some of the largest websites in the world, too.

One of the most significant advantages of Next.js is building a static page to hold dynamic data. You know, the front page always looks the same but is populated with various data streams, which change depending on when you load it, even throughout the day.

IMDb is one such site that exemplifies this design. Their pages are all static but populated with the relevant data, whether it's the video stream on the front page or the static information about a movie in individual film records. It even maintains a user's browsing history and shows you dynamically-populated data customized just for you. Imagine trying to do that with plain old web dev!

Starbucks is another billion-dollar company using Next.js for its site design. In this case, you can see that the Starbucks homepage is very light on elements. It's essentially just a stack of large-format CTAs for things like their menus, their rewards card, and their partnership with food delivery.

Where things get more complicated and interesting is in 

. Starbucks Stories feature everything from individual employee tales to the company's efforts to preserve the environment and the communities they join. You may or may not be skeptical about the truth of their efforts – they are, after all, a billion-dollar company – but they will certainly let you explore their efforts with a quick, reactive Next.js implementation.

One of the tell-tale signs a site is using Next.js is when you click between sub-pages or elements, and the page loads quickly or immediately. At the same time, it takes a very slight moment – fractions of a second, but just barely enough to notice – for the dynamic data to load in. You can see this on Starbucks if you tab between sub-sections.

Who doesn't know Hulu by now? Next.js power the video giant and Netflix competitor.

After all, if you think about it, what better use case for something like Next.js? You want a framework that allows for easily-generated, static, fast-loading pages. You want the ability to dynamically adjust and load in server-side data without requiring a full page reload. A framework page with data about a media piece, plus a dynamic element to display the video data and the video itself? That's a perfect use case for Next.js implementation.

Hulu isn't alone, either. Netflix also uses Next.js for the same set of reasons. Both of them are pretty similar in design and infrastructure when you get right down to it, so it's no surprise they run on the same architecture.

Many people assume that it's a massive overhead cost and a considerable expense to run a site and service like Netflix or Hulu. They're right, but it's not because of the web design itself. The site's actual design itself doesn't need to be expensive or run on expensive architecture. Instead, it's because of the sheer cost of the servers required to store the video files and the bandwidth necessary to serve millions of people at a time.

You might have noticed something about the sites listed above. All of them showcase dynamic data from a server on a static client page, but they all do so in primarily grid-and-table-based formats. It's easy to do that. Populating a table or loading a grid of images is the most straightforward web design to accomplish.

What about something a little more complicated? Something that doesn't align nicely to a grid? Something like, say, national borders?

Take a world map, with all of the countries delineated, and then make each nation a dynamic source of information. That's what WorldPopulationReview does, at least at the top of their page. Their interactive map lets you see the population numbers for any country you can highlight with your cursor.

Moreover, any element you click on will let you drill down to that element and see even more data about it, from tables to charts to graphs, all nicely presented and loading near-instantly.

Next.js is an excellent framework to use when you have a lot of heavy, complicated data that can display in a compelling and visually-distinct way. A lot of this data isn't necessarily easy to parse at a glance if it's presented as a plain old table, after all.

Critically, of course, all the site has to do to update their page is update whatever data sources they pull from. Since much of the data comes from third parties, they barely need to do that. Everything populates and updates automatically.

Another example of a significant brand using Next.js, Hilton is a global hotel chain using the framework for their website.

Another thing you might have noticed about pretty much all of the sites above is that they tend to have relatively static information and purposes. They exist to showcase information, possibly in exciting ways (like WorldPopulationReview and CoinMarketCap), or they live to show you media (like Hulu, Netflix, and IMDb). Even those that provide their services or products, like TailwindCSS, are little more than interactive ways of displaying information. Click on the call to action from TailwindCSS, and you're just taken to the documentation page, which is itself just a series of elements displaying information.

Hilton is a little different and a little more advanced. While a core part of their service is still just showing information from a database – hotel location and room information – it also has all of the advanced data processing and task handling necessary to pick and book rooms.

There's a lot more going on here. Your data can change based on the date and duration of a stay, based on location (of course), and based on membership level. Yet, all of it is comfortably handled by Hilton's web design, all using Next.js. It just goes to show how easily the framework can take just about anything you throw at it.

One of the foremost resources for all things video games (and many things related to nerd culture, including movies and comics), IGN has a massive web presence and is one of the top websites in the world. It's also absolutely packed with content, given that they have an unending stream of publishing for just about every new piece of media that comes out, as well as older media they slowly build up guides and resources for.

Next.js is used to make an extremely lightweight front-end that loads very quickly. This functionality is critical to IGN because video game and nerd culture niches are highly competitive. There are easily a dozen or more sites competing for every single topic and keyword they want to rank for, which means IGN needs every advantage they can get to take one of the top few spots.

It's well-known that a fast-loading website is a huge part of modern-day SEO. Google prioritizes a fast-loading site over a slower-loading site, even if that slower site might have slightly better content. The average user has such a short attention span that they can't cater in another direction.

In many cases, a site's edge needs to take over the top spots from its competitors. Next.js is an excellent framework for precisely this reason. Sites designed using it are typically extremely fast to load their initial framework and most considerable content, which is all part of Google's Core Web Vitals.

Gartic proves another capability of Next.js that many others don't; multi-user functionality. Gartic provides a collaborative drawing game, sort of like Pictionary, with online matchmaking and multi-user rooms.

This impressive site just shows that Next.js is a robust framework that you can use to make pretty much anything you can dream up. Individual, largely-static pages? Sure! Enormous, sprawling services for a global entity? Easy. Interactive games with dozens of users simultaneously? Why not? You can do anything you imagine using Next.js as the front end and server interface.

Do you have a big idea? Do you want to bring that idea to life? We're experienced in making different products and services using Next.js and a host of other modern technologies. 

Here's the deal: you can make it yourself or hire the pros.

All you need is an idea and a budget. There's no obligation, no up-front costs, and nothing at stake beyond your time. 

 today to discuss your vision and how we would go about creating it for you. 

You can also see our past work to see what kinds of sites we build for people just like you.

10 Examples of Web Apps That Are Built with Next.js

Marketplaces make the world go 'round. Whether it's a physical marketplace to buy the goods you need to live, an online marketplace to buy and sell luxury products, or even a service marketplace to rent or trade, there are hundreds of big-name marketplaces and thousands more you might never have heard of at all.

We're not being facetious. Just because a marketplace is small, niche or little-known doesn't mean it's terrible or not profitable. There are roles for niche marketplaces, and they can often be some of the best hubs available. Sure, the dream may be the next Amazon, but you shouldn't plan on it.

Designing and building an online marketplace is a great way to run a business, make money, and never have to deal with your inventory. As a platform, the service you provide is access to others, and sometimes, that's all you need to be successful.

The only question is, how can you do it? How can you develop an online marketplace that has the potential to be wildly successful? Luckily for you, we have some tips.

Tip #1: Refine Your Pitch and Selling Point

The first (and possibly most important) thing you have to do is figure out what your marketplace actually will be. 

What makes you stand out from the pack and find traction in a world dominated by sites like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Craigslist, and Etsy?

Are you a marketplace for goods or services?

 In the modern market, you're generally going to want to be narrow, to do one thing better than everyone else. For example, Amazon is a marketplace for goods, while Uber is a marketplace for a service. Craigslist has sections for both.

 Airbnb is for short-term housing, Etsy is for vintage and crafted goods, Decluttr sells used items, and Cratejoy is for subscription boxes. It would help if you had a relatively narrow, specific focus as your core offering, so you can refine it to stand out.

What problem do people encounter that your marketplace solves?

 What pain point are you solving? Why are people going to choose your platform over something else out there? When faced with the alternative in a giant like Amazon, how do you convince people to go with you?

Defining your product is only one half of the story; defining your target audience is the other half. This process determines how you market and write your website copy to target them. How you address some middle-aged pet moms will differ from how you sell to Gen Z digital natives.

 Chances are, you're not the only person to have your idea. What other marketplaces out there do the same thing you do? How do you stand out and separate yourself from them?

 Indirect competitors are the marketplaces that are not offering your target but could with a minor adjustment. If they can quickly become competitors, you need to account for them expanding into your territory once you prove it's plausible to do.

By answering these questions, you refine yourself a business plan. You can use this business plan to pitch your idea to developers to venture firms that might fund your launch.

Your marketplace needs to make money somehow. Otherwise, it's not a business; it's a charity. Sure, people would flock to a marketplace with no charges or fees, but that marketplace wouldn't be long for the world without a constant incoming flow of venture funding. It's not sustainable. 

Your marketplace takes a small cut out of every successful transaction your platform facilitates. This strategy is excellent as your marketplace grows, but if your audience is skewed (too many sellers, no buyers, for example), transactions won't complete, and you won't get paid.

 Your marketplace requires that users – either all buyers, all sellers, or all users – pay a fee to access it at all. The "no commission fees!" selling point can be valuable here, as can the exclusivity of a walled garden, but it's a high barrier to entry, especially when you're first starting.

 Most parts of the site are free, but advanced features are not. Buyers might need to pay for a premium account to access Wishlisting, leave premium reviews for sellers, or access restricted categories. Sellers might need a premium account for priority listings, business analytics, branding features, or other features. This option leverages the 80/20 rule, where 80% of your profits come from 20% of users by lowering the barrier for the additional 80% of users.

 Everyone who wants to sell something on your platform needs to pay to post the listing for X number of days or until it sells. Great for buyers, but a higher barrier for sellers to get into it, and potentially suppressive of small-ticket, high-volume items in favor of more significant and expensive items.

Both your buyers and your sellers use your site, and they'll see ads on your platform; selling ad space to third parties lets you monetize without needing to charge either your buyers or your sellers. Unfortunately, ad blockers, ad blindness, and the fact that ads send your users off-site all make this less ideal.

It's quite variable. You have some flexibility with this as you're designing and launching your platform. If you're backed by venture funding, you may even be able to ignore it until you can perform market research to determine the best monetization plan.

Remember, as well, that there are often legal regulations on certain kinds of monetization, like escrow. Remember to research your geography, jurisdiction, industry, and other realms for legal regulations.

Once you have a plan, you need to build your marketplace 

. There are generally six ways to do this.

Coding your platform from scratch is the most flexible option. It gives you the most robust array of customizations since you're not reliant on anything other than the limit of your developers' abilities. However, it's also the most time-consuming and expensive. Moreover, depending on your pitch, you could be reinventing the wheel.

Numerous frameworks (open-source tech stacks) are easily customizable and usable to build a marketplace. It's cheaper and faster than building from scratch but still offers a reasonable amount of flexibility (and unlimited customization if your developers know how to customize the stack.) On the other hand, you have to work within a framework someone else designed, which may not align with your ideas.

Build up utilizing existing platforms and plugins.

With the right combination of WordPress plugins, you can build an eCommerce platform indistinguishable from a custom-coded marketplace, except for people familiar with the back end. It's generally cheap to set up but much more restrictive on features and requires keeping potentially dozens or hundreds of plugins, applets, and pieces of code up to date and functioning together.

We live in a world of SaaS, software as a service, with thousands of businesses offering products as a service for those who want them. It should come as no surprise that there's a "marketplace as a service" (MaaS) platform option available. These can work for creating quick, agile minimum viable product deployment but lack advanced customization, which could be a significant hurdle. Pay to use one, build your marketplace on top of it, and get up and running quickly and easily.

You can read more about all of these options here.

At this point, you're ready to start building your minimum viable product. This model is your bare-bones, quick-launch product that offers just enough features to make your platform functional and prove that it can do what you want it to do. So, it needs ways for buyers to buy, ways for sellers to sell, and a demonstration of your unique selling point. 

In general, a marketplace MVP should include:

You don't need to build your authentication and user management; just have people log in using Google/Facebook/Twitter/Microsoft/whatever other OAuth logins you want to offer.

Create distinct user profiles for buyers and sellers.

 Buyers don't care about a dashboard with seller features, and sellers don't need special features for buyers. Even if your platform is bare-bones, you need enough to make each side distinct and valuable.

 Did you know that Amazon is the third-largest search engine in the world? People will use your search to find what they want to see, so make sure you have robust searching integrated from the start.

 Buyers might have questions to ask sellers, and sellers might need to clarify details with buyers; provide the option to message directly.

 How do your buyers know which sellers to trust? A reviews system is essential in a modern marketplace.

an appropriately PCI-compliant payment gateway

 is essential to the functionality of your platform.

All of this, coupled with a bare minimum design you can fluff up later, allows you to get your marketplace up and to run as quickly as possible. Remember, you can always add features later, as long as your initial launch product has everything your audience needs to get started and hooked.

Tip #5: Attract Buyers and Sellers in Equal Measure

As a marketplace, you have two distinct target audiences: the people who would buy and the people who would sell. Sometimes these are very similar, and sometimes they are very different. Either way, you need to attract both kinds of people. You need to build and maintain a balance between the two groups. After all, a marketplace with no buyers is a museum, and a marketplace with no sellers is a discussion group.

There are many ways to market your marketplace. Try blogging and content marketing, paid ads, promoting your business in social media groups and Reddit, and anywhere else that may be receptive and host the kinds of people who will be most interested in your marketplace.

Tip #6: Watch for Points of Failure and Make Adjustments

Once your MVP is out the door and live, and your marketing is doing its job, the real fun begins. Now you wait, watch, and be ready to make agile adjustments based on your audience's pressures, requests, and ideas.

If a bug crops up, fix it. If a pain point starts to block users from using your marketplace, smooth it out, and if many users start to request a specific feature, prioritize it. If no one uses a core feature, push it more, or reconsider if it's necessary.

Make sure to harvest your data from various sources. Send out customer surveys and satisfaction questionnaires. Monitor social media and the communities that spring up focused on your platform. Watch out for black hat exploits, hacks, compromises, or fraud. Monitor customer feedback from any channel you can.

Be very careful when making major decisions. Be aware that a very vocal minority will often use your platform who get very angry when it doesn't work the way they want. Catering to these people can sometimes appease them but often move the goalposts. It's also possible that whatever they want would be more detrimental to your overall marketplace than the value they bring.

Of course, once your marketplace is up and running and has proven that there's both an adequate audience and that it's functional, you're in the perfect position to grow, expand, pull in venture funding, add more features, and generally improve.

Once you've reached that point, you have one more major decision to make. Will you sell when one of the significant corporations comes calling? If Amazon wants to buy you, do you accept? Sorry, we can't help you with that decision. We can, however, assist with building a stable, secure, and effective platform in the first place, so 

 for a direct chat about your next big idea.

6 Tips to Help You Design and Build an Online Marketplace

You have a brilliant idea for a new web-based software-as-a-service product. You're all set to go. Well, there's just one problem: you need to make it. The hard part is coming up with the winning idea, so you should start putting it together and get it on the market. How hard can it be?

The truth is, there's no shortage of ideas, and it's more complicated than most people realize to bring a SaaS product to reality. Even if you're operating on an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) basis, it's a lot of work. Here's how you can do it.

Before you can even begin bringing an idea to fruition, you need to understand the market you'll be entering. You need to answer critical questions, which will require some actual legwork and research.

You have a business idea, but what, precisely, does it do? How does it do it? You can't just come up with an idea like "A service to facilitate the comparison of informatics reports between business systems" and expect that to be meaningful. 

You don't need a deep understanding of how to code it, but you should at least know how it functions. You can pin down the details later, but your overarching processes and systems should have an outline ready to go.

No, we're not talking about demographics here, not specifically. Think about it like this. Do you intend to market towards consumers or businesses? That is, will your product be 

If you're marketing towards consumers, are you aiming for those without much money to spend or those with money to blow? If you're aiming at businesses, are you looking to provide services for small companies, mid-sized organizations, enterprise companies, nonprofits? There are a lot of possible options.

You might notice that many SaaS platforms out there cover all of the bases with a graduated tier system for plans, ranging from limited personal plans to unlimited enterprise plans. You can certainly do this, but you should have a core focus to start with and grow from there.

3. Do other products performing the same task exist?

You might think your idea is unique, but there may be competitors out there who already offer the service, and you don't know about it. Maybe they call it something else, or it's part of a more robust, overarching product, or perhaps their service isn't quite the same, but close enough. 

Do your research! Nothing is quite as awful as bringing a hot new product to market, only to find someone else already does it, and you didn't know.

4. What is your Unique Selling Point to overcome competition?

If there's competition for your SaaS product – and there probably will be – you need to have some idea of how you're going to out-compete them or find your place in the market. In other words, what's your Unique Selling Point, and how do you stand out?

Your product is smaller, less bloated, and more agile as a unitasker.

Your pricing is lower to appeal to a broader market of customers on a tight budget.

Your marketing focuses on appealing to a segment of the population typically not interested.

You emphasize premium quality and luxury over the mass-market appeal.

read more about developing your own USP here

5. What is your business model going to be?

With SaaS, you're already going to be operating on some recurring charge business model. That's the "Service" part of SaaS, after all. The question is, how? 

Are you charging monthly fees? Are you charging license fees for assets as Canva does? Are you charging on a credits system? Your monetization will need to be built in from the ground up, after all.

6. Have other companies attempted to do this and failed?

When researching the competition, one thing to be wary of is if it looks like you've found a completely untapped market. Your idea seems utterly unique, something no one has tried. Unfortunately, the reality is probably much darker.

The idea might be, well, bad. Maybe, with the proper marketing, you can push it through, but often it's just a waste of time.

The idea might be way more complex or more complicated than you imagined. Others have tried and failed, which is why you don't hear about them.

This is a warning. You might be able to succeed where others have failed, or you might end up just another parched skeleton in the desert of ideas. Give some serious thought to which is most likely.

Once you've answered these questions, you have the beginnings of a business plan. Formalizing all of this into a tangible document is helpful, but at the very least, you want to have the answers available in mind.

Once you have some idea of what the market looks like, it's time to turn your gaze inward and start figuring out what your product will look like. It's SaaS, right, but what else?

You'll need to make a significant decision deciding on the tech stack you'll be using to develop. Sometimes, this doesn't matter all that much. 

Sometimes it's a critical decision that determines what environments you can operate within and what APIs you can interface with.

Pick your core programming frameworks, like Python, Java, or Node.js.

Pick a front-end, like Jquery, React, or Angular.

Pick a back-end database platform, usually some variation of SQL.

Pick a cloud infrastructure such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud.

Choose between monolithic or microservice architecture.

If all of this sounds pretty technical, that's because it is. You can do some research by reading guides 

, or you can reach out to a product developer (

Before you start writing a paper or a book, you build an outline. Before you leave on a trip to Point B, you plan on the route from A to B. You map the journey.

Software is no different. Whether you're making a desktop program, a mobile app, or a web SaaS product, you need to map out the user journey.

You have a core pitch for your product, which the user will come to your product to do. Now you need to determine how they do it. They start at an authentication page and are taken to a dashboard. What menus are on the dashboard? What about the sub-menus and the data that is displayed? How will a user proceed through your app to complete tasks? How much hand-holding will you give them?

Often, an app's flow can make or break users' feelings about using it. They won't necessarily care about how nice it is to use your service if the user experience is terrible or it takes too much work to do what they want to accomplish with it.

3. What will the pages and interfaces look like?

Once you have a user flow down, it's time to flesh it out, and that means one thing: wireframing.

Wireframing is basically sketching out how you want the app and its pages to look and feel to use. Where will certain elements be? How will they be laid out and formatted? You can do this in all manner of different ways. We've seen people sketch them out on paper, and we've seen advanced, multi-layered layouts in Photoshop and even interactive graphics whipped up in pure HTML and CSS. 

Importantly, wireframing is not functional; it's made to demonstrate layout and design, which the code will replicate.

It can be beneficial to explore the SaaS apps that already exist. What design conventions are your users expecting? How will they navigate your app intuitively? What elements should you incorporate in your design to make it feel effective? 

4. What integrations, APIs, and other data will it need?

This lays the groundwork for development for certain SaaS apps, particularly those that serve as middlemen and aggregators. If you're going to be combining data from different platforms to generate reports, you need to be able to access that data. 

That means API access from those companies, so they need to offer it, and you need to be able to afford it. You'll also need your app designed to pull in and use that data, so your developers should know ahead of time what APIs they need to work with.

5. Will you have any specific security concerns?

Depending on the kind of data you're handling, you may need to put some serious effort into cybersecurity. 

Other SaaS platforms don't have to care about it beyond the usual billing and authentication security. Just make sure you keep it in mind.

You're the company owner, CEO, and idea leader, but you can't do it alone. Now you have a decision to make: who will be making your app? Typically, you have three options.

For the first option, you identify what you need to be done, break it into specific tasks, and pay freelancers to do it for you. You will need to wear many hats and operate as your own project manager. You need to know enough about what you're doing in order to correctly assign tasks, guide development, and keep freelancers in communication with you and one another, as necessary.

This is the cheapest option, but it's also the most work for you, personally, by far. It's also the riskiest option, as freelancers might have something come up and need to drop out mid-project, which you might not always be able to afford.

The second option available to you is hiring people to build your company. This is a more expensive and time-consuming option than managing freelancers because you need to know what you need and go through the interview and hiring process for your developers. And don't forget, you need more than just developers. 

You can very quickly turn one idea into a 30-person team in a startup, and that escalates rapidly. Building your dream team is an unforgettable experience, but it's also a tall order, especially if you've never run a business before. It's easy to cut corners and skip something like cybersecurity hardening or QA testing, but when bugs show up later, it could cost you a lot of money, or worse, your app can fail.

Your third option is to hire an agency that handles SaaS product development.

This option is generally the most expensive, but also the fastest. These agencies (like us!) are packed with talented developers, engineers, and designers. They can take your business plan, your pitch, your wireframes and produce a working SaaS product much faster than the other two options. The trick is, you handle everything else, and you handle paying for it.

Most people don't have what it takes to build a dream team or wrangle a gaggle of freelancers. If you want to take an idea for a SaaS product and bring it to reality, working with a development agency like ours is the more effective way to do it. All you need is the vision and the funding.

If you're interested in a helping hand that can guide you through the full process from start to finish, please 

 today. We're more than happy to help you get up and running, and we can work out the details on a one-on-one call.

And, once your product is up and running, then you're ready for the hard part: keeping it going, growing it, and turning it into a profitable business.

How to Build a SaaS Product from Scratch (With Expert Tips)

In web app development, technologies come and go like the winds. Sometimes a popular technology falls by the wayside in a matter of months. Occasionally a newcomer to the field swiftly picks up market share until it's the dominant force on the market. With tech churn continually cycling the field, it can be challenging to understand which framework to pick for your next project.

 is a JavaScript library designed for quickly building user interfaces, including various functions that make for robust and functional apps. Its flexibility combined with its predictable design, ease of debugging, and component-based structure has made it a favorite amongst developers since released in 2013. Of course, part of that growth and support comes from the backing of Meta (formerly Facebook).

One of the primary limitations of React is that it's solely focused on front-end UI creation, passing state to DOMs, and rendering UIs. As such, it's only one part of a total development environment and can't be used on its own for most use cases.

 is a framework meant to work with React. It's an iteration of Node.js and is intended for server-side rendering (SSR) and generating static websites. Like React, it is open source, maintained by Vercel (formerly ZEIT).

The primary use case for Next.js is to enable a React-based site to render content on the server-side rather than solely on the client-side.

 is a single boilerplate framework built out of various dev tools. The list of tools includes (but is not limited to) webpack, Babel, ESLint, and more. CRA is designed to be a single dev environment packaging a variety of tools while ensuring that they all work seamlessly together, are updated as one whole package, and reduce pain points and development friction to the barest minimum.

Like React, Meta maintains Create-React-App as part of Facebook Open Source. In other words, the goal is to streamline the ability to create a React app. After all, a developer should be working with code, not troubleshooting their framework.

What Are the Primary Differences Between Create-React-App and Next.js?

There are quite a few differences between these frameworks, though both are built upon working with React at their core.

For those who care, Create-React-App is maintained by the Facebook Open Source movement, while Next.js is not. Next.js is created, copyrighted, and maintained by Vercel. React is also supported by Facebook Open Source, so both React and Create-React-App are generally going to be maintained at the same rate, while Next.js has the potential to fall out of sync occasionally.

That said, having Facebook Open Source maintain CRA is generally a good thing. It ensures that everything is kept up to date, functional, and fixed whenever an issue arises. In contrast, putting together your environment means you're often forced to handle updates and troubleshooting yourself.

In development, you can do rendering on the client-side or the server-side. 

Both methods have advantages and disadvantages

The server-side rendering parses data from various sources, produces and renders a page, and sends the result to the user. In client-side rendering, the server hosts the directives and sends them out, where the client's device does rendering work.

SSR is generally faster for small pages and single-page apps; CSR often requires multiple back-and-forth requests to the server to pull data from databases before the finished product can be rendered and interacted with or used.

SSR generally offers less in the way of interactivity on the resulting page, as it is static-generated for the client. Client rendering allows for dynamic and ongoing rendering.

When moving from one page to another, SSR requires a new request to render from scratch, including a complete UI. CSR can maintain continuity of UI and other static elements while only rendering page elements that change.

Essentially, SSR is suitable for single pages, static pages, and instances where the page only loads once or sporadically. CSR may take longer for the initial load but saves time and resources in subsequent page loads and interactions.

To see a test of these two in action and which one provides better results, check out 

Create-React-App is, by default, solely a client-side framework. Next.js allows for both client-side and server-side rendering.

One of the foremost reasons to use Create-React-App is the simplicity of the development environment.

In some ways, you can liken it to macOS versus Linux/Unix. macOS "Just Works," with a relative minimum of fiddling around with operating system settings getting between you and the programs you want to use. Conversely, using a Linux distribution often requires more manual configuration, component upgrading, driver selection, and other tweaks and fiddling.

With CRA, you're given a set of tools and an environment to work with. They work the way they work, and you can work with them as they are.

With Next.js, you are given one framework and can use other tools with it as you see fit, but you may need to do more manual updating, troubleshooting, and bug fixing between tools.

This simplicity in CRA benefits those who want a simple tool that works when needed and doesn't break when it updates. However, if you're going to do configuration or tweaks to profiles in one of the tools provided by CRA, you aren't able to. Instead, you have two options.

 breaks your project out from the Create-React-App framework; you can change configurations, add or remove tools, and generally customize everything yourself. However, you are then responsible for maintaining all of those components. Since component maintenance is the primary reason to use CRA in the first place, this is a huge downside.

The other option is to use a third-party tool like Craco. 

 is the Create React App Configuration Override. It is, essentially, a third-party recreation of the configuration options provided by the tools in CRA, allowing you to simulate changing them without having to eject your project.

There's nothing essentially wrong with using a third-party tool. However, given that one of the main benefits of CRA is that everything is packaged and maintained in one lump, adding another confounding factor that can fall out of sync can be a difficult hurdle to overcome.

React as a core library is not opinionated. Next.js, however, does include some opinionated decisions in its design.

These decisions are primarily focused on server-side routing, which is critical to ensure that you can develop a server-side app made with Next.js in a minimum amount of time.

By contract, CRA is very opinionated. They have picked the components they want to work with, and while you can use external resources with it, they don't make it as easy to manage.

. It is, put simply, the creators of the framework making decisions on how best to implement certain features, rather than presenting all of the options to you and letting you make a choice. If the developers' choices are in line with your needs, they facilitate development and make your life a lot easier. On the other hand, if you want a different path, you have to do more work to make it function.

One of the primary benefits of using Next.js is using APIs. 

When you want to create an application that uses APIs from a third-party source, your app typically needs an API of its own. This step can be challenging to do with CRA out of the box, but Next.js is designed to allow you to set up APIs with a tiny amount of effort.

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