The second time this request happens, we already have the data from the server, so the Tanstack Start is going to be like, hey, I got this and manage it all using React query that again a lot of us love and get it from the cache. So, what makes Tanstack really special is that it's fully typed. 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. I have to truly debug it or maybe ask AI to do it. But still, with TypeScript, it's going to help a lot because it's fully typed. It has streaming by default, like we talked about what streaming is. It also has isomorphic loaders. That means loaders that run on the server initially, then on the client for client-side navigations, like we looked at as well. It has server functions now, which is really cool, and that makes it easier to make server-based calls. It already has the React query integration, so you could just use it right away and use it out of the box.
And the sites that are ideal for Tanstack would be this dashboard of my SaaS that I talked about for Proofy Bubble. I'm trying to modify this bubble and add a lot of different interactivity. In this case, maybe I could have used Next.js or React Router. But ideally, Tanstack is the best contender for this one because this is a client-heavy app. It will have a lot of caching, a lot of changes that Tanstack Start is just going to manage. So any type of interactive dashboards, admin panels, so on, Tanstack is a great start. But Tanstack Start is not ideal for you if your goal is a server-rendered site with zero JavaScript or minimal client-side interactivity, or you are looking for a React Server Components-first framework. Again, this is coming soon. So Tanstack Start is still in beta, so keep that in mind. I mean, it's not really a fair comparison when other frameworks are already, you know, getting built and used by a lot of companies, which Tanstack Start is also being used, but it's still in beta, so remember that. And it's already so powerful, so I cannot even imagine how powerful it would be after its full release.
So next pillar is adoption, how easy it is to adopt any of these frameworks. So if you take a look at the stars on GitHub, we have 132K on Next.js, 55K for React Router, and then for Tanstack, it's 10.3K. However, keep that in mind, in terms of the ecosystem, for all of these, they have been... Next.js, even though maybe has been around for a long time, but React Router on its own has been around as well for way longer, and so has React Query and so on. So if you look at it holistically, then I think any of these frameworks would be a great choice. In terms of NPM downloads as well, this is something that I actually got from tanstack.com, and it has a really good comparison for how many downloads, last week, period downloads, and so on. And you can already see that React Router here is actually a winner. But keep in mind, React Router v7 came out quite recently, or like over the last year or so, whereas React Router has been around for a very long time. So something to keep in mind, that you have to also consider that when it comes to adoption.
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