Next.js, React Router, TanStack: When To Use Each

Are all frameworks the same? Not exactly, according to developer and educator Ankita Kulkarni.

Kulkarni compared TanStack Start, React Router v7 and Next.js, identifying the best uses for each. She presented her findings at React Summit 2025 (free registration required), which was hosted by GitNation in June. The video of the presentation was released late last month.

What’s particularly interesting about her presentation is that she didn’t just compare the frameworks; she suggested the particular situations where each JavaScript framework excelled.

Next.js

What makes Next.js special, according to Kulkarni, is that it provides an easy way to integrate search engine optimization (SEO).

“We get a serverless platform out of the box,” she said. “We have different data fetching mechanisms.”

This makes it ideal for e-commerce sites, marketing sites, landing pages, SaaS dashboards, blogs and documentation sites, she said. She added that it’s good for serving a lot of static content, or even hybrid content, meaning dynamic as well as static content. (Note: many industry experts would disagree it’s suitable for blogs or other simple content sites, due to the complexity of React-based frameworks.)

The Next.js ecosystem is superior compared to other frameworks, she said, but the learning curve is a bit steeper. For example, developers have to learn two different types of routers with Next.js: App router and Pages router, which is a legacy offering. It’s also complicated by server actions, server components, different behaviors and versions, and different rendering methods. “There’s definitely a steep learning curve here,” she said.

She noted that Next.js “has come a really long way” in terms of developer experience.

Next.js has also embraced React Server Components (RSCs) early, “giving us a glimpse into what full-stack React could look like before most frameworks were ready,” she said.

Kulkarni recommends choosing Next.js when you:

• Want built-in optimization or to use server components (RSC).
• Need granular caching controls.
• Have no custom webpack builds.
• Want wide adoption and community support.

React Router v7

React Router v7 became a framework when the core features of Remix were merged into React Router v7‘s framework mode.

What sets it apart is it bets on web standards, she said.

“What it does is it unifies the client and server with web standards, so you can think less about your code and more about your product,” she told audiences. “Whenever you try to Google anything — for example, a form component — you can straight up go to the MDN docs to look for how the APIs are going to look. They’re going to lean on web APIs directly, instead of adding a wrapper on top of a form component that a lot of other frameworks do.”

React Router v7, as a framework, also incorporates the flexibility of using React Router, she added. This makes it easy to create a standard CDN-hosted (content delivery network) single-page application (SPA). A web developer could easily migrate that and add server-side rendering hosted on any server, she said, adding, “That’s the beauty of it.”

React Router and Tanstack use Vite for the build system, which is incredibly fast, she added.

“Because both of them use Vite, it’s already a good start” for developer experience, she said. Vite uses a plugin-based system that makes it easy to add functionality. “You can think of it as Lego boxes that you can pick and choose from,” she said.

Where React Router can slow developers down is that it’s tightly coupled with web standards, so it can get a little tricky because of the tight coupling, she said.

“You have to make a lot of decisions here whenever you go with React Router and overall, it’s just the experience is better,” she said.

Choose React Router v7 when you:

• Care about progressive enhancements, web standards and ALLY (at least in a React context).
• Want deep nested routing.
• Want no limitations for integration to cloud platform.

TanStack Start

TanStack Start is a full-stack React framework powered by TanStack Router and supported by an ecosystem of TanStack tools.

“What makes TanStack really special is that it’s fully typed,” Kulkarni said. “I can’t remember the number of times I have changed routes in other frameworks and everything breaks, and I have no idea a lot of times what’s working and what’s not.”

TanStack will help with that because it’s fully typed, she added. It also has isomorphic loaders, which means loaders that run on the server initially, then on the client for client-side navigations. TanStack also offers server functions, which make it easier to make server-based calls, she added. It comes with React Query integration, so it can be used right out of the box.

Kulkarni discussed building a SaaS application. For the dashboard interactivity, she would need lot of client rendering, she said. For that, TanStack is “really powerful and useful.”

In particular, she had a bubble with a lot of interactivity on the page.

“In this case, maybe I could have used Next.js or React Router, but ideally, TanStack is the best contender for this one,” she said. “Because this is a client-heavy application, it will have a lot of caching, a lot of changes that TanStack Start is just going to manage.”

For any type of interactive dashboards, admin panels, and so on, TanStack is a great start, she said.

However, TanStack Start is not ideal if the frontend developer’s goal is a server-rendered site with zero JavaScript or minimal client-side interactivity, or the developer wants an RSC framework — although she added that support for RSC is coming soon.

She also noted that TanStack Start is still in beta.

“It’s already so powerful, so I cannot even imagine how powerful it would be after its full release,” she said.

Choose TanStack Start when you:

• Already use React Query/TanStack Router.
• Have the client heavy apps.
• Need streaming + SSR without complex abstractions.

The slides for her presentation are available for free viewing, although this seems to be an older version of the presentation because, instead of TanStack, it offers an evaluation of Astro.