[crucialfelix]

Nextjs does the same thing. That's not a business model.

Non tech people often know about Gatsby and compare it to WordPress.

I have to warn decision makers that it promises a lot but adds complexity that wastes developer time.

[nlarew]

> Nextjs does the same thing. That's not a business model.

A business model doesn't need to be unique in order to be successful. Also Gatsby is open source, so I wouldn't expect to find profits falling out of the core library. They make their money through consulting and cloud ops.

> adds complexity that wastes developer time

Every framework comes with its own flavor of complexity. To blanket say that Gatsby wastes time ignores the real benefits it provides and the opportunity cost of getting those benefits through some other library (or even more daunting, writing and maintaining a homegrown framework).

If web performance matters to you or your business then effort focused in that direction is not a waste. The complexity of learning/developing with Gatsby/Next is significantly lower than getting those benefits without them.

[adriand]

It's also just plain fun to use, IMO. I built a site using Gatsby for a product I'm helping with (https://greeter.ai/) and it was a really fun and enjoyable experience. The site is blazing fast. The ease of React integration, Node modules, Gatsby plugins, etc., further add to developer productivity and enjoyment.

I see a really bright future for slick, fast, well-documented solutions that significantly depart from the Wordpress/massive CMS model and rely on highly-modern technologies that developers enjoy working with. Couple something like Gatsby with a framework that makes design a lot easier too (e.g. Tailwind + Tailwind UI) and suddenly, as a developer, you're so much more capable than previously.

I dunno. This old Rails programmer is loving it. And if I can learn to love it, I think they've got a market.

[milchek]

It’s funny, because I did just as your post suggests and built my latest personal site using Gatsby and Tailwind and it was an overall positive experience. I loved that I didn't have to do any design (although, sure, you could argue that might be a negative in terms of the result) and the build/deploy process was really simple with Netlify.

My previous sites were built with Wordpress and before that I used AMFPHP and Flash (over 10 years ago!). This was a breeze compared to those sites.

[rpastuszak]

Yeah, I was reading that and thinking that you can replace every instance of Gatsby with Next.js and the text would still hold.*

I noticed that IDEO uses Gatsby for their site, so I'm starting to think that the main difference is PR/marketing.

* I've worked with Next, 11ty, jekyll, hugo, but not Gatsby, hence the interpretation. Gatsby feels like less boilerplate than Next. I'll check it out once I find an excuse to use it.

[agustif]

NextJS might be open source but it's from a company (recently renamed do) Vercel, before known as Zeit.co, which has also a lot of VC dollars behind it's belt.

Microsoft owns github, npm, vscode, typescript...

I mean...