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gatsbyjs/gatsby
React-based framework with performance, scalability, and security built in.
Gatsby is a React-based static site generator that builds sites at compile time and ships pre-rendered HTML to a CDN, with optional SSR and deferred static generation per page. It's aimed at content-heavy sites — blogs, marketing pages, e-commerce — where you want React's component model without paying server costs per request. It's mature, heavily documented, and has a large plugin ecosystem.
Automatic performance defaults are genuinely good: code splitting per route, image optimization via gatsby-plugin-image (lazy loading, LQIP, multiple formats), inlined critical CSS, and prefetching on hover are all on by default without configuration. The per-page rendering mode (SSG vs DSG vs SSR) is a real architectural win — you can have mostly static pages with a handful of SSR routes in one build without standing up separate infrastructure. The GraphQL data layer is well-designed for content aggregation: pulling from Markdown files, a CMS, and a REST API into a single typed schema at build time is a reasonable trade-off. The monorepo has serious benchmarking infrastructure under /benchmarks that actually measures build performance across real scenarios rather than just unit tests.
Build times on large sites are genuinely painful — thousands of pages can take 10–30 minutes, and the incremental build story has historically been unreliable outside of Gatsby Cloud (now defunct). The GraphQL requirement for data fetching is a significant forced abstraction: simple sites end up writing GraphQL queries to read local JSON files, which is more ceremony than most projects need. The plugin ecosystem is wide but shallow — many plugins are community-maintained, abandoned, or haven't been updated for v5, so you'll spend real time debugging peer dependency hell. Next.js has largely eaten Gatsby's market for new projects and gets more active development attention; Gatsby v5 shipped in 2022 and the trajectory since has been maintenance-mode releases rather than new capability.