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by tomduncalf 2234 days ago
Interesting, just yesterday I migrated a site from react-static to Gatsby (because of a nasty bug that’s been open in react-static for ages, seems to be struggling somewhat for maintenance) because I thought Gatsby looked simpler than next.js, haha.

Perhaps it was just that Gatsby felt closer to react-static’s model and it was more readily apparent how to adapt a react-static site to Gatsby with as few changes as possible, using their createPage api to replace the route config in react-static and bypassing all the GraphQL as described in https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/using-gatsby-without-graphql/ - I didn’t have time to do a detailed comparison of frameworks or rebuild large parts of the site.

I was pleasantly surprised how quick and easy the migration was, took me about 90 mins for a site with about six templates and Gatsby seems to build faster and has a much better ecosystem of plugins etc. I wrote up the process at a high level at https://github.com/react-static/react-static/issues/1203#iss... if anyone is interested in the specifics

Did I understand correctly that next.js isn’t just a static site generator and ideally you have a server side component too? This was what started confusing me in their docs, but perhaps I got the wrong end of the stick.

I’ll have to give next.js a proper look next time I’m building a site from scratch anyway!

1 comments

OK, ended up migrating another site I manage to next.js as the preview feature is a killer for the site admin, and I have to say I do like it more. It's a bit more work to migrate but I think worth it. Thanks for the recommendation!