The deepest ecosystem for full-stack React work. App Router, server components, server actions, edge functions — all production-ready in 2026. Owns the "rich app, lots of interactivity" lane. Watch out for edge function invocation costs on content-heavy sites; that's where Astro wins.
Next.js is the deepest-ecosystem React framework — the default choice for full-stack React work in 2026 unless you have a specific reason to choose otherwise.
When to reach for it
SaaS dashboards, rich apps with lots of client state, anything that benefits from React Server Components and seamless server/client boundaries. The Vercel integration is the smoothest deploy story in the industry.
Where it falls short
Content-heavy sites pay an unnecessary tax on the Next runtime when they’d build perfectly as static HTML. Edge function invocation costs can surprise on busy content sites — every middleware execution, every RSC prefetch counts. Pick Astro for those workloads.