What I recommend to anyone starting React is setting up your own development environment. That means installing and configuring Webpack, Babel, CSS preprocessors and everything you need to run your project.
It may sounds boring or useless, but the experience and understanding of these tools helps you decide in the future what tool is the right one for your project. CRA may be excellent for prototyping but Next is great for SEO and speed. It's all up to you!
I would recommend not to setup Webpack, Babel, CSS preprocessors. This is incidental complexity. You want to write and deliver website, right? All this has nothing to your initial goal. For example, you can take CRA and start to write website without spending time on webpack. Or you can take parcel and start to write website without spending time on webpack. Convention over configuration.
Back to original answer.
You want to use Next.js if you want to do SSR e.g. you have highly dynamic content and there is no way to do it statically
You want to use Gatsby if you have mostly static website, like blog. Drawback you need to understand GraphQL
Create-react-app ideal starter for beginners, good defaults. But you will not be able to do SSR, you still can do prerendering with react-snap.
You want to use react-static for static websites and you don't want to deal with GraphQL.
Hi!
What I recommend to anyone starting React is setting up your own development environment. That means installing and configuring Webpack, Babel, CSS preprocessors and everything you need to run your project.
It may sounds boring or useless, but the experience and understanding of these tools helps you decide in the future what tool is the right one for your project. CRA may be excellent for prototyping but Next is great for SEO and speed. It's all up to you!
Hope my answer helped!
I would recommend not to setup Webpack, Babel, CSS preprocessors. This is incidental complexity. You want to write and deliver website, right? All this has nothing to your initial goal. For example, you can take CRA and start to write website without spending time on webpack. Or you can take parcel and start to write website without spending time on webpack. Convention over configuration.
Back to original answer.
A bit more here dev.to/stereobooster/server-side-r...