Give Sveltekit (and Svelte) a shot. No webpack, no turbopack, and feels very very fast and ergonomic.

Next.js has definitely gotten heavier. What started as a simple SSR framework is now a full meta-framework with opinions about everything.

If you're looking for something lighter, give Astro a shot. The philosophy is refreshing - zero JS by default, only hydrate the interactive islands you actually need. Works great for content-heavy sites.

For full-stack apps with similar patterns to Next.js but less magic, Remix and SvelteKit are worth exploring too.

What's your main pain point with Next.js? Complexity, Vercel lock-in, build times, or something else?

Next.js comes with several built-in capabilities. For example, it supports prefetching, server-side caching, and even cache clustering if you need scalability.

It also has a significant market share right now.

Of course, React Router 7 (and Remix) can handle similar features. But adoption matters — a larger ecosystem usually means better job opportunities and stronger community support.

If you haven’t used any major framework yet, I’d recommend starting with Next.js. It’s a solid way to learn the modern React stack and understand how full-stack React apps are structured.

Does not using it count as alternative?

React Router 7 is all you need. You could also use Next.js @ 15.1 with strictly static generation and freeze at that version. Use next routing for statically generated pages and React Router for dynamic pages.

I would go with https://tanstack.com/ as that has components to replace almost all Next.js features.

I'm planning on using tanstack start in my next project. Seems to have had a lot of good press recently

Something else. I.e.: ditch React and go with Vue/Nuxt :-)

Just don't use it. NextJS is not needed, the concept of BFF is just marketing.

Use Astrojs if you need something.

i've been having fun building with astro on cloudflare workers... i have a few apps that have API endpoints, content, and react/svelte components all glued together in one codebase. it's been relatively easy to add drizzle and cloudflare's D1 database to handle data stuff alongside everything else.

I've been using SvelteKit.I find it pretty easy to use.

vue+quasar

just want something comparable to next (api layer, ssr ability, nice surface api), for a relatively simple case (oauth with ms, simple api to query other apis).

I'm avoiding Next because deploying it on anything non-vercel sucks.

Yeah, I feel the same. Deploying Next.js outside of Vercel always comes with a few extra headaches. It’s great on Vercel, but not as smooth elsewhere.

React Router?