Comparing frameworks: Next vs. Remix

Modern frameworks have revolutionized how quickly developers can build websites. Many of these frameworks have used React’s awesomeness to produce fantastic products without restrictions, including routing, server-side rendering, SEO, and others.

Understanding which framework is appropriate for you is crucial, which necessitates thorough research on each.

Next and Remix are two frameworks that have taken advantage of React to build functional frameworks that come with out-of-the-box tools for server-side rendering, automatic code splitting, and static site generation.

This article compares Next and Remix: two React-based frameworks for building fast web applications.

What is Next?

Next is a Javascript framework created by the Vercel team and built on React. Next allows you to create fast, supercharged, SEO-friendly websites. It also provides out-of-the-box support for features like static and server rendering, TypeScript support, smart bundling, route prefetching, and more.

What is Remix?

Remix is a full-stack React framework. This means that Remix comes with server-side rendering capabilities that allow you to use React on the front end while being able to support Node.js environments. With Remix, you can build unique applications while keeping to web standards. It also supports Typescript, code splitting, smart bundling, route prefetching, and more.

Why use Remix or Next for building web applications?

React is an excellent framework for building user interfaces and is the most popular Javascript framework today for building client-facing applications, but some limitations come with React. The teams behind Next and Remix have worked on these limitations to make them better options when creating your applications. Some limitations associated with React that have been worked on in Next and Remix include routing, data fetching, SEO, etc.

• Routing: Remix and Next both come with out-of-the-box support for routing. This means that you don’t need to install alternate libraries like react-router-dom to handle routing.

• Data fetching: Both Remix and Next support various forms of data fetching like server-side rendering, static-site generation, and client-side rendering.

• SEO: Next and Remix render HTML on the server rather than the client. This means web crawlers can crawl through the already generated site, increasing SEO. They also come with Meta tags stored on your site and used to access your application’s meta information.

Comparing Next and Remix

This section will cover comparisons between Next and Remix. We will use metrics like speed, data fetching strategies, support for cookies and sessions, etc.

Speed

When we talk about speed, we mean the rate of serving both dynamic and static pages to the client, and right now, Remix comes on top. One reason for that is due to the way they cache data. Remix cache search pages while Next can’t. This means that sites are loaded faster with Remix than with Next.

GIF source

Data fetching and loading strategies

With Next, you can choose between multiple options for how you want to load your application: on the server, on the client, or you can choose to do both. In addition, Next.js provides you with various methods for loading your site. You can, for example, use getServerSideProps to load your site on the server in run-time.

export async function getServerSideProps() {
  return {
    props: {},// this will get passed to the page component
  };
}

Or you can use the getStaticProps and getStaticPaths functions to load your data in build time.

// getStaticProps example
export async function getStaticProps(context) {
  return {
    props: {}, // this will be passed to the component as props
  };
}
    
// getStaticPaths example
export async function getStaticPaths() {
  return {
    paths: [
        params: {}
    ],
  };
}

Remix provides a loader function for loading data from a server:

import { useLoaderData } from "remix";

export let loader = async ({ product }) => {
  // get a param from the product
  const id = params.product.id;

  return { id };
};

export default function SomePage() {
  let product = useLoaderData();
  return (
    <div>
      <h1>The params is: {product.id}</h1>
    </div>
  );
}

Support for cookies and sessions

Cookies and sessions are used to store users’ information across sites. Sessions temporarily store data on the server to be used on numerous website pages. They contain sensitive information about a user’s activity on an application.

Remix has built-in support for handling sessions and cookies using the createCookie method.

import { createCookie } from "remix";

const cookie = createCookie("cookie-name", {
  maxAge: 604_800, // one week
  expires: new Date(Date.now() + 60),
  httpOnly: true,
  path: "/",
  secure: true,
});

Next.js has no built-in support for sessions and cookies, but you can use third-party libraries like next-auth.

CLI and ease of use

They both come with CLIs for bootstrapping their apps quickly. Next comes with the create-next-app CLI command for rapidly creating a Next application, while Remix comes with the create-remix@latest for getting started with Remix apps.

Remix and Next have a low learning curve since they are both built on React. If you have a good knowledge of React, you can quickly get started with Next and Remix.

Image optimization

Next comes built-in support for image optimization, known as the next/image component. This component enables size controls, lazy loading, and image loaders in a Next application.

Remix does not have any built-in support for image optimization at this time.

Integrations

Next offers a wide range of customizability which can be included through the next.config.js file. You can also add plugins to your Next application using this file.

Remix does not offer the same extensibility and integration at the moment.

Conclusion

We have compared Remix and Next.js: two full-stack React frameworks for building fast applications. We used metrics like image optimization, speed, data fetching and loading, CLI and ease of use, and integration.

This article does not aim to tell you which React framework is better but rather to present you with facts to enable you to make an informed decision about which framework is suitable for your project.

Gain Debugging Superpowers

Unleash the power of session replay to reproduce bugs and track user frustrations. Get complete visibility into your frontend with OpenReplay, the most advanced open-source session replay tool for developers.

Check our GitHub Repo