The short answer: if you are building anything that needs to be indexed by search engines, serves complex data to anonymous users, or will scale to significant traffic, start with Next.js. But there are real cases where plain React is the right call — and conflating the two leads to overengineered solutions that are harder to maintain than either option done well.
Next.js is primarily a server runtime. Its value comes from server-side rendering, static generation, incremental static regeneration, and the App Router's React Server Components. If you are not using at least one of these capabilities meaningfully, you are paying the complexity tax without the performance benefit. A Vite + React SPA would likely serve you better.
Plain React makes sense for: internal dashboards and admin tools that sit behind authentication and do not need to be indexed, single-page applications where you control the entire data flow client-side, and prototypes where the overhead of server-side concerns slows you down. The Vite developer experience is excellent and the production output is highly optimised.
The App Router's React Server Components model changes the mental model significantly. Components default to server-rendered, async data fetching happens directly in components without useEffect, and streaming enables progressive rendering for slow data sources. For new projects this learning curve is worth the investment — the performance and developer-experience improvements are substantial.
One common mistake is treating SSR and SSG as interchangeable. SSR renders on every request — great for personalised or rapidly changing content, expensive at scale without a cache layer. SSG generates at build time — blazing fast when served from a CDN, but requires a rebuild to update content. ISR is the middle ground: revalidate cached pages on a schedule without a full rebuild. Understanding this distinction is fundamental to architectural decisions.
The practical decision framework: does this app need SEO? Does it fetch significant server-side data? Will it serve anonymous and authenticated users from the same domain? If yes to any, Next.js. Is it a behind-auth tool with complex client-side interactivity and no public pages? Vite + React is simpler, faster to iterate on, and perfectly capable.
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