Next.js is a fast-growing React framework that is used by over 300,000 repositories now [source]. Next.js has a broad set of features that both IndieHackers and Fortune 500 companies love. Check out the large number of sites in their showcase.

This post is an investigation that attempts to answer the following:

First, why React?

To understand the success of Next.js, we need to first look at the success of React.

The numbers

Is React really that popular? Let's check out some data points.

Installs

As of this writing, React gets about 7.75 million weekly installs and is a dependency to over 3.9 million GitHub repositories [installs source, dependencies source].

That's a lot of npm install react@latest going on.

If we look historically at this weekly download metric on npmtrends.com, the lead React has is staggering.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/e3faf8b4-8d90-4a37-bb60-b07c7f1038e7/react-vs-vue-vs-angular.png

React compared to Vue, Angular, and Angular core from npmtrends.

Three notes from this graph:

  1. WOW, things really shut down in December.
  2. GitHub stars mean less than you think they do.
  3. Angular is hard to measure because of the split (angular.js vs angular explanation).

I started building applications using React in late 2017. It wasn't until mid-2018 that my job fully embraced React and started building a shareable internal component library.