I've used both NextJs and CRA. Both these frameworks can be used to get started quickly and provide a good developer experience. However, both of these have use cases where either of them shines better. I'll try to compare them based on some of these factors. Feel free to suggest edits with additional points or comments
Server Side Rendering
| CRA | Next.js |
|---|---|
| CRA doesn't support SSR out of the box. However, you can still configure it. It just takes more effort to setup SSR with your preferred server and configuration. The development team doesn't have plans to support this in the near future. They suggest other tools for this use case. | NextJs has different types for SSR. It supports SSR out of the box. * Static generation: fetch data at build time. This works best for use cases like blogs or static websites * Server side rendering: fetch data and render for each requests. You have to do this when you need to serve different view for different users. |
Configurability
I think this is point where these tools are very different and your decision can depend on this factor
| CRA | Next.js |
|---|---|
| Create React App doesn't leave you a lot of room to configure it. Configurations like webpack config cannot be changed unless you stray away from normal CRA way (eject, rescripts, rewired, craco). Basically, you have to use what's configured in react-scripts which is the core of CRA. | Almost everything is configurable. If you check the example NextJs templates, you can see files like babelrc, jest.config, eslintrc etcthat you can configure. |
Maintainability
| CRA | Next.js |
|---|---|
| CRA is very opinionated. If you keep updated with the releases of CRA, it's not hard to maintain. | NextJs is also well maintained. They release regular updates. |
Typescript
| CRA | Next.js |
|---|---|
Supports out of the box. You can initialize CRA app with typescript withnpx create-react-app my-app --template typescript | Supports typescript out of the box. Start with configurations for typescript with touch tsconfig.json |
Hooks support
Latest version of both CRA and NextJs installs a version of React that supports hooks. You can also upgrade to the latest version easily
Redux support
Redux is a library that you can use with both these tools.
