In this episode of Syntax, Scott and Wes talk about Gatsby vs Next. A lot has changed in the last year — what are the differences, and do the recommendations from Syntax 120 still hold true?
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Show Notes
03:34 - Server-rendered
- Both do server rendered
- Gatsby is gone at build time
- Next is done at build and on deploy
05:26 - Static generation
- getStaticProps()
- getServerSideProps()
08:25 - Re-rendering pages
- Gatsby can be re-rendered and re-deployed - any CMS lets you do this on only the pages that changed.
- Gatsby-cloud
- Next.js has the revalidate flag that will re-render when stale
18:54 - Data management
- Gatsby has a built in GraphQL API feature with
- Next.js has nothing - it’s not their problem. Use Apollo, or SWR, React Query, or redux, or whatever you want.
23:16 - Client-side data
- Neither do anything, next.
26:33 - Dynamic Pages
- List of 100 shoes, each one gets a page
- List of four types of shoes: basketball, runners, casual, bowling, etc.
- List of 10 colors: each color gets its own page.
- List of 12 sizes, each size gets its own page.
- Now it gets complicated when you do this:
- Show me basketball shoes, in red, in size 5
- 600 pages minimum
- What about size 6+7?
- Then you get into having to fetch data on the client side - but all your data is in GraphQL?!
- The queries are different!
- Gatsby will get “Hosted GraphQL”: https://twitter.com/kylemathews/status/1252803849775009794
30:41 - Routing
- Neither do nested routing still
- Both do folder based wrapper
34:50 - Hosting
35:54 - Images
- Compression/resize
- Lazy loading
- SVG
- Blur up
- Next 10 released first revision of Next.js image
- It’s not as good as Gatbsy-image
- Must specify width and height, whereas gatsby has fixed and fluid
- Compression
- No blur up
- Yes lazy loading
- both don’t support gifs
- Gatbsy requires annoying GraphQL query OR another plugin like MDX to do it
- Next.js is just
