OVERVIEW
Nextjs is a framework built on top of Reactjs to provide more features and use-cases than React itself . Nextjs is currently being used a lot in the industry and programmers are loving using it. It is fast , it is efficient and provides more power.
React vs Next
The main reason Nextjs has become so popular because of it's highlighting feature to being able to build server sided rendered web apps which enables the app to load quickly on the clients side and doesn't let them wait. Nextjs has all the features of React and a lot more. Since the first day I have started building apps with Nextjs I don't remember last time I ran the command create-react-app! Nextjs offers lazy image loading built in so that instead for the browser to be keep loading the image then render the entire webpage , with lazy image loading now the webpage can be loaded without waiting for all the images to be rendered and the images will be lazily loaded in the background without any hassle and drop in the performance of the website.
Why Next.js ?
->Server Side Rendering (SSR)
->Built in API Routing : instead of using express , nextjs comes prepacked with api routing and can be done easily
->Dynamic API Routes : Nextjs constructs different pages for a particular page dynamically For eg: if you are building an e-commerce web-app and you want to dynamically build detail page for each component . Nextjs makes it very easy by dynamically creating pages