The best CMS for Next.js

Why React Bricks?

React Bricks is the first CMS built in React, designed for React and Next.js with inline visual editing. It provides content editors with an exceptional editing experience, comparable to Wix or a word processor, while ensuring a superior developer experience and adherence to brand standards.

Working with React Bricks in Next.js is like creating a custom Lego bricks set, as you create content blocks as React components with TypeScript, enhanced by the React Bricks' visual editing components.

Your content creators or marketing team will use these content bricks to compose pages, with all the freedom they need, but with no way to compromise the design system.

React Bricks natively supports the App Router and React Server Components for enhanced performance and development experience.

Getting started with Nextjs

Creating a Next.js website, blog, or landing pages with React Bricks takes just a few minutes. All you need to do is launch a CLI command:

npx create-reactbricks-app@latest

And choose one of the 4 Next.js starters:

• Website and Blog with Tailwind CSS and App Router
• Website and Blog with Tailwind CSS and Pages Router
• Empty Project with App Router
• Empty project with Pages Router

What is Next.js?

Next.js is a framework to develop React apps and websites with great performance and SEO optimization.

Next.js is a framework designed for developing high-performing, SEO-optimized React applications and websites.

Known as the first React framework simplifying Server Side Rendering, Next.js is trusted by some of the world's largest websites. It offers high flexibility, supporting static generation (SSG), server-side rendering (SSR), and the powerful incremental static regeneration (ISR).

Starting from version 14, Next.js also supports React Server Components, to avoid unnecessary client hydration and achieve top performance.

SSR, SSG... what do they mean?

This section briefly explains these acronyms and our recommendations for common use cases. For a more in-depth understanding of the trade-offs, consider reading our CTO's article Server Side Rendering vs Static Site Generation vs Incremental Static Regeneration.

Server-side rendering

With Server-side rendering (or SSR), the React rendering process is run on the server. This produces an HTML page with content that search engines' web crawlers can view, even without executing JavaScript. Once the page loads, the client application starts, aligning its status with the server-generated DOM.

SSR is great when you need SEO and you also want to be sure that the user always has the latest version of a page, even if it means a higher load on the server.

Static site generation

With Static site generation (or SSG), a static version of the website is generated during the build process.

This process optimizes images and creates optimized junks of JavaScript code that are lazy-loaded. As a result, search engines have highly performant static pages to crawl and evaluate for ranking. Once the client app starts, it works like a single-page application.

Static site generation is ideal when you don't have a large number of pages and your content doesn't change very frequently.

Incremental Static Regeneration

Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) combines the advantages of both Server Side Rendering (SSR) and Static Site Generation (SSG), while mitigating their shortcomings.

With ISR, each time a page is visited, it's initially rendered server-side (like SSR). However, it's also cached as a static page, enabling quicker access and reduced server load for subsequent visits. You can also set a stale time to keep the static version of the page updated with the desired frequency.

ISR is great when you have a large number of pages, as it prevents long build times. At the same time, the most frequently visited pages are served efficiently as static pages.

Advantages of React Bricks compared to a Pure Headless CMS

1. Content editors save time with Inline Visual editing

React Bricks offers a true inline visual editing experience, like Elementor, but based on a performant React frontend. This feature allows content creators to be as productive as they would be using a word processor, without the risk of compromising the design system.

2. Developers save time - It's Just React!

React Bricks simplifies the development process by removing the necessity of switching between a headless CMS to create fields and the code to retrieve and display the data. You define fields directly within your React components.

Inline visual editing is powered by visual components such as Text, RichText, and Image within the components' JSX. Other properties, for example to change the background color, are mapped to sidebar controls. This approach is both straightforward and robust, ensuring that the corporate image cannot be compromised by content editors.

3. Empower the marketing team

Once bricks are created, no developer's time is required any more: content editors of the marketing team are autonomous composing pages.

4. No User Training Required

A headless CMS can be complex for the marketing team. React Bricks helps content editors feel comfortable from the start, so that users don't need any training.

Why React Bricks is the best CMS for Next.js?

• React Bricks has a great developer experience, because you define the content blocks using React components with TypeScript.
• Developers save time by enabling content editors to work autonomously.
• The marketing team has a great interface with inline visual editing, so that they are immediately efficient (it's like Wix, but for corporates).
• The corporate image cannot be compromised, as editors have good constraints defined in code.
• React Bricks is enterprise-grade.
• It is batteries-included with: with Digital Assets Manager, Advanced SEO, Localization, Collaboration, Scheduled Publishing, Approval Workflow, Multiple Environments, Single Sign-On (SSO), Permissions, Scheduled Backup, ability to Self-host and more.