I previously visited nexjs.org and read the docs, and it wasn't clear that Next.js is a full-stack framework. The term "full stack" isn't used anywhere at nextjs.org[1], unlike rubyonrails.org[2].
Furthermore, there are numerous references on the web to Next.js being a front-end framework, including statements made by Next.js maintainers[3]. Do these statements not reflect the current state of Next.js?
If Next.js is a full-stack framework, then this seems to be another instance of JavaScript tools having inadequate documentation. Speaking of which, if Next.js is a full-stack framework that's comparable to Rails and Django, why is the documentation just one page (!) and there's no mention of database migrations or other basic features that are included with every full-stack framework?
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q="full+stack"+site:n
vercel
next.js
JavaScript2016–2026
vercel / next.js
next.js
The React Framework
165Distinct people
198Mentions
3Explicit recommenders
143.5KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
The React Framework
GitHub
Where it is used
- Vercel — “If you already have a project with Next.js, install Vercel CLI and run the vercel command from your project's root directory” Source
- Plex — Plex uses Next.js to power their web experiences with SSR, on-demand ISR, and Edge Middleware. This helped improve search ranking and traffic after their relaunch. Source
What people are saying
> You don't think you're maybe contorting yourself to make some of these arguments work? First of all, I still prefer TypeScript to Python when it comes to language features.…
spion used a recommendation phrase. 3 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- react/create-react-app · linked in 4 of the same discussions
- gatsbyjs/gatsby · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 1:57:11 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year198 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-10-25 16:05:56 UTC to 2026-05-15 16:42:15 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 19 | 2 | 17 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 1 | 13 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 1 | 7 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 18 | 2 | 16 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 29 | 3 | 26 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 19 | 3 | 16 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 29 | 3 | 26 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 1 | 12 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 38 | 8 | 30 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 3 | 5 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Next.js
Getting Started
Used by some of the world's largest companies, Next.js enables you to create full-stack web applications by extending the latest React features, and integrating powerful Rust-based JavaScript tooling for the fastest builds.
Visit our Learn Next.js course to get started with Next.js.
Visit the Next.js Showcase to see more sites built with Next.js.
Documentation
Visit https://nextjs.org/docs to view the full documentation.
Community
The Next.js community can be found on GitHub Discussions where you can ask questions, voice ideas, and share your projects with other people.
To chat with other community members, you can join the Next.js Discord server.
Do note that our Code of Conduct applies to all Next.js community channels. Users are highly encouraged to read and adhere to it to avoid repercussions.
Contributing
Contributions to Next.js are welcome and highly appreciated. However, before you jump right into it, we would like you to review our Contribution Guidelines to make sure you have a smooth experience contributing to Next.js.
Good First Issues:
We have a list of good first issues that contain bugs that have a relatively limited scope. This is a great place for newcomers and beginners alike to get started, gain experience, and get familiar with our contribution process.
Security
If you believe you have found a security vulnerability in Next.js, we encourage you to responsibly disclose this and NOT open a public issue.
To participate in our Open Source Software Bug Bounty program, please visit https://hackerone.com/vercel.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
14 sourcesIn SimpleSSR: Server-Side Rendering at Scale
React is more of a library instead of a framework and it's just the view layer. Next.js is a framework(minimalist) for React.
https://github.com/zeit/next.js/
In Next.js 7> Next.js is a minimalistic framework for server-rendered React applications.
https://github.com/zeit/next.js/
So a specialized framework based on another framework
In Next.js 7create-react-app is actually removing this feature in an upcoming release. We don't have plans to include it as a feature to Next.js as you can already implement it using a custom server. We do have an example for it: https://github.com/zeit/next.js/tree/canary/examples/with-cu...
In Next.js 7Correct!
The way that is achieved is pretty neat, Next.js has a <Document />[1] component that you can extend. This Document is essentially your application shell that is used when server side rendering.
Here is the trends Document component[2] where you can see I'm simply omitting `NextScripts` which ends up being the frontend bundle with react + application code
[1] https://github.com/zeit/next.js#custom-document
[2] https://github.com/hanford/trends/blob/master/pages/_documen...
In Show HN: Trends – A GitHub trending PWAWhy that? I think the number of starter/boilerplate projects for React is already overwhelming.
I wish create-react-app was the only one way to start a React project, but it has its own limits:
- not intended for server-side React apps
- not intended for React components library
- not intended to be used with TypeScript but Flow (could change with the next major version tho)
Still, there are already so many alternatives, some of them just reinventing the wheel. Do we really need another one? I'm not sure.
- https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app (50k stars)
- https://github.com/react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate (19k stars)
- https://github.com/kriasoft/react-starter-kit (18k stars)
- https://github.com/davezuko/react-redux-starter-kit (10k stars)
- https://github.com/insin/nwb (3k5 stars, support Preact & Inferno & components libr
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aries)
- https://github.com/zeit/next.js (26k stars, server-side support, very opinionated)
- and so on… just type "react boilerplate/starter/toolkit" on google. Most of them are out-of-date and not maintained, making the process of choosing one ever more overwhelming.
On the framework side:
If you need an ORM and you don't need any interactive views then Django is a good choice. (Interactive views are views that are stateful in the browser: an interactive graph, an interactive table, a To-Do list, etc.)
If you need interactive views then you'll have much easier time using a React+Node.js framework such as Next.js (https://github.com/zeit/next.js) or Reframe (https://github.com/reframejs/reframe). And if you need an ORM you can use one of the many Node.js ORM such as https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm
If your site is static then go for a static site generator such as https://github.com/nozzle/react-static. ("Static sites" are webapps/websites that are HTML-static: The HTML doesn't need to be dynamically generated at request-time but is static, no server is required, and your app can be statically served
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.).
Disclaimer: I'm Reframe's author.
In this situation, I'd suggest Next.js which is kind of a framework for React applications and instead of trying to understand how React and related technologies are working, you can just start using it. Just go to https://nextjs.org/learn/ and spend half an hour, probably you'll understand how it works and how you can do basic things such as navigating a page or deploying it to somewhere.
I believe, between React, Angular and Vue and all their boilerplates Next.js is the easiest one to understand. And they have a huge example library in their GitHub repository if you want to know how a certain package/library/service works. In your case, this might help: https://github.com/zeit/next.js/tree/canary/examples/data-fe...
In Ask HN: Very simple REST client in JS. Which framework should I use?Next.js: Framework for server-rendered or statically-exported React apps
1 points · Open discussionI've personally been meaning to rebuild my personal site with Next.js: https://github.com/zeit/next.js/
Used it to build a few static sites at work and have quite enjoyed it as you get to use React.
In Ask HN: What's a good static site generator to use for a blog in 2018?Use any, really.
If you want "best in 2018," in Node, my recommendation is Next ( https://github.com/zeit/next.js/ ) - it is extremely good if you want to kick something up fast, and get it out as an MVP. And can be extended upon to have a rich application, with a variety of other frameworks.
In Ask HN: Best web framework in 2018Vacucu is an online portal where individuals can request, search, and book customized sports activities & sports activities related services. Anyone can define trips based on their needs and requirements (include transport, accommodation, extra services) and will get customized quotes from verified providers. You can then book the offer with no additional costs.
Built using JS stack (Node.js & React.js) with server-side rendering thanks to the awesome framework https://github.com/zeit/next.js/
Any feedback/criticism is highly appreciated.
Thanks,
Ejaz.
In Launch HN: Vacucu – Define and book customized outdoor activitiesI don't actually use any of this, so I'm not intimately familiar, but I found a promising looking framework and a help article on redux itself.
https://github.com/zeit/next.js/
https://redux.js.org/docs/recipes/ServerRendering.html
In Guide to JavaScript FrameworksOne of the authors of Next.js here. I want to clarify that all the points against Next.js are virtues! They probably just arise from Rich not being so familiar with it (or not having looked at the examples/ directory extensively: https://github.com/zeit/next.js/tree/canary/examples)
1. I think this point is trying to say that we don't have special "mask files" inside `pages/`, which is an idea worth exploring. Right now, Next.js instead gives you full flexibility on how you want to match the routes on your server (as it should be). For example, `your-domain.com/xyz` can even first perform a database query before deciding what page to render it with (if any).
2. What the author points out as a weakness here is that you can handle server things directly in your server code (`server.js` using micro or express for example). That sounds like t
Read the rest
he right thing to do to me, and if you don't want that, you still can do something like:
// pages/my-server-page-only.js
export default ({ req, res }) => res.end('hi')
3. "To use the client-side router, links can't be standard <a> tags." This is by design. Magically overloading `<a>` to add client-specific behavior sounds like the days of jQuery or TurboLinks. If you want client-side behavior, wrap `<a>` in the higher-order `<Link>` component. There also very important properties of the `<Link>` like `<Link prefetch>` that are simply not part of the `<a>` standard definition.
Also noteworthy: the entire ZEIT Documentation is written in Markdown with React components. It's open source: https://github.com/zeit/docs
On size: the Next.js and React teams are both working towards really interesting solutions to ship only the code that's necessary, without resorting to templating as the main strategy. Our team actually spends more time on the 'compiler' parts of Next.js than the 'framework API' parts. (the API has barely changed since the initial 0.1 release in fact).
Additionally, since Next.js uses React as peer dependencies, you'll also get to do `yarn add next react react-dom-lite` https://github.com/jquense/react-dom-lite in the future.
Overall, I think Sapper is an excellent framework for Svelte users. I'm looking forward to seeing more Next.js-like frameworks.
For Vue users: check out https://nuxtjs.org/!