Definitely, compared to Gatsby, Next is much simpler. At least every time I tried Gatsby, I just had to give up after a few hours because of the complexity and massive amount of boiler plate that you had to stitch up yourself from examples.
Bonus: Next's built-in API support makes building quick APIs for your project (and its static/hybrid/dynamic) data loading a breeze. While not suited for everything, at the very least, Next and Airtable can get your POC/MVC/prototype running in a day.
The few times I tried to build something in Gatsby I was bogged down in mediocre documentation and a mountain of (maybe?) necessary plugins. I don't know.
Not sure how to feel about Gatsby's GraphQL-first approach either.
Forcing everything to go through graphql is also a pain and adds an unnecessary indirection that requires a million extra dependencies.
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!