Beyond Next.js: The State of Full-Stack JavaScript Frameworks in 2025

For one, self-hosting Next.js in a traditional enterprise deployment pipeline is a pain. The framework doesn't lend itself to the common build-once-deploy-anywhere pattern. Because it tightly binds the output to environment variables and runtime settings, you often need a separate build per environment—a frustrating constraint for anyone used to promoting artifacts from staging to production with confidence. Then there's the middleware story. Middleware runs in a weird hybrid runtime that supports some Web APIs and a restricted subset of Node.js. This awkward middle ground feels more like an internal tool built to fit Vercel's infrastructure than a broadly useful feature. In fact, much of Next.js seems increasingly shaped by Vercel's hosting model—which is great if you're all-in on their platform, but less so if you're not. From a developer experience standpoint, things aren't much better. The documentation is sprawling, inconsistent, and full of "old vs new" decisions that beginners have to internalize. Should you use the App Router or Pages Router? getServerSideProps or a server component with fetch? When do you use the use client directive? How does caching even work? The answer, often, is "it depends," followed by hours of documentation spelunking. All of this results in a framework that feels overengineered and unnecessarily complex. For newcomers, the learning curve is steep. You don't just learn React—you also have to learn Next.js's routing model, its rendering modes, its proprietary caching behavior, its deployment quirks, and its middleware runtime.