Remix vs Next.js: A Detailed Comparison

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A detailed comparison between Remix JS and Next.js frameworks

Next.js is one of the most popular React frameworks used for server-side rendering. It’s been there for a significant time, and it provides an exceptional developer experience with all the features developers need.

However, with the open-source introduction of Remix, developers have started to wonder which the better framework for their application is. So, in this article, I will compare and contrast some significant features of Next.js with those of Remix to help you choose the best framework.

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Routing

There are many similarities between Remix and Next.js when it comes to routings. For example, they follow a file-based routing system and support nested routing and dynamic route segments.

As far as similarities are concerned, when you create a file inside the /pages directory, it will be automatically set as a route in Next.js.

pages/index.js ==> /
pages/users/index.js ==> /users
pages/users/create.js ==> /users/create

Remix also can create automatic routes. But, you need to place the files in the app/routes directory.

As regards differences, Remix routing is built on top of the React Router, and it allows you to utilize React Hooks, like useParams and useNavigate. On the other hand, Remix has built-in support for nested routing with the nested layouts, while Nest.js requires manual configurations.

Data Loading

There are several data loading techniques in web applications. Those are:

Server-side rending in the runtime.
Server-side rending in the build time.
Client-side rending at runtime.
A mix of server-side runtime, client-side and server-side build time, and client-side runtime.

In Next.js, developers can use all the above techniques with different functionality to export data from a page.

You can use getServerSideProps it to load the data on the server-side at runtime while getStaticProps and getStaticPath can be used to load the data from the server-side at build time. The following example shows how to use getServerSideProps to load data.

export const getServerSideProps = async ({ params, query }) => { 
  // get a param from the url const id = params.id // getting data from the url query string const DataLimit = query.DataLimit
  return {props: {id, DataLimit}}
};
export default function FirstPage() { 

  let {id, DataLimit} = useLoaderData(); 
  return ( 
      <div> 
        <h1>The parameters are: {id}</h1>
        <h1>The DataLimit url query is: {DataLimit}</h1> 
      </div> 
  );
}

In Remix, there are only two methods to load the data. You can use the server-side at runtime and the client-side at runtime to render the data.

You have to export a loader function from a route to load data from the server-side and useFetcher Hook in Remix to load data on the client-side.

import { useLoaderData } from "remix"; 
export let loader = async ({ params, request }) => { 
  // get a param from the page url const id = params.id // getting data from the url query string const url = new URL(request.url) const dataLimit = url.searchParams.get("dataLimit")
  return {id, dataLimit}
}; 
export default function FirstPage() { 
  let {id, dataLimit} = useLoaderData();
  return ( 
        <div> 
          <h1>The parameter is: {id}</h1> 
          <h1>The limit for url query is: {dataLimit}</h1> 
        </div> 
  );
}

Next.js supports server-side rendering (SSR), static site generation (SSG ), Incremental site regeneration (ISR), and CSR (client-side rendering) . On the other hand, Remix only supports SSR and CSR.

Use of Sessions and cookies

There are no built-in functions to interact with cookies or sessions in Next.js. But popular libraries like Cookie.js can work with Next.js or NextAuth.js to perform user authentication and save session data in a cookie.

Remix has support for cookies and sessions out of the box. You can generate a cookie by calling a function, then serialize or parse data to store or read it.

The following code snippet from the Remix shows how to create a logical function for managing a browser cookie in Remix.

import { createCookie } from "remix";

const cookie = createCookie("cookie-name", {
  expires: new Date(Date.now() + 60),
  httpOnly: true,
  maxAge: 60,
  path: "/",
  sameSite: "lax",
  secrets: ["s3cret1"],
  secure: true
});

Deployment

Next.js can be installed on any server that can run Node.js by running next build && next start.It has built-in support for running in serverless mode when deploying to Vercel, and the Netlify team has written an adaptor for serverless deployment to their service.

The Remix was built to run on any platform and interface with any system. As a result, Remix is a request handler inside an HTTP server, allowing you to utilize any server. When you build a Remix app, you’re asked where you want to deploy it, and you have the following options as of this writing:

Remix App Server
Express Server
Netlify
Cloudflare Pages
Vercel
Fly.io
Architect (AWS Lambda)

Styling

The Remix is slightly different from Next.js when it comes to styling. Remix offers a built-in technique of linking classic CSS style sheets using link tags, while Next.js comes with Styled-JSX as the default CSS in JS solution.

Styled-JSX allows you to style your components with encapsulated and scoped CSS in your Next.js application. You can use <style jsx> tag into the existing React component and define the CSS inside that as follows:

function Home() {
return (
<div className="container">
  <h1>My Cart in Next.js</h1><p>Some paragraph</p><style jsx>
    {'
      .container {
        margin: 20px;
      }
      p {
        color: blue;
      }
    `}          
   </style></div>
 )
}               
export default Home

Remix uses a simple method to add styles to the page using<link rel ="stylesheet"> tag. When you add the stylesheet link, you can use the links module in Remix routing to export the layout. The code snippet below shows how to use the links function to load the stylesheet in Remix.

export function links() {
return [{
      rel: "stylesheet",
      href: "https://test.min.css"
   }
  ];
}

The following example shows how tag merges the links component in each nested route when rendering the myCart component.

import { Links } from "remix";
export default function myCart() {
  return (
    <html><head><Links />
        {/* ... */}
      </head>
      {/* ... */}
    </html>
  );
}

Conclusion

Remix improves the developer experience with new abstractions and the user experience by distributing less JavaScript. But Next.js has a more extensive user base with more significant resources allocated to its development from the Vercel team.

The Remix is mainly used for personal projects and toy applications when it comes to real-life applications. On the other hand, Next.js is used in many production applications.

Overall, Remix is a robust framework, and it will become more prevalent in 2022. But when dealing with production-level applications, using Next.js would be the obvious choice since it is well established and has community support.

We hope you have found this helpful. Thank you for reading!

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