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vikejs/vike
(Replaces Next.js/Nuxt) 🔨 Build mission-critical applications with stability and development freedom.
Vike is a build-your-own-meta-framework tool for Vite — it gives you SSR, file-based routing, and pre-rendering as unbundled pieces instead of Next.js/Nuxt's all-in-one package. It's aimed at teams who've hit the ceiling of what Next.js allows them to configure and want direct control over the server, build, and deploy pipeline.
The separation of vike (core) from vike-react/vike-vue/vike-solid means you're not locked into React the way Next.js locks you in — you can swap UI frameworks without changing your routing or data-fetching model. It plays directly with Vite's plugin ecosystem rather than wrapping it, so Vite plugins mostly just work. The docs site (vike.dev) is unusually thorough for a project this size, covering deployment targets (Cloudflare, Deno, AWS, Docker) individually rather than punting to generic 'it should work' guidance.
You're trading Next.js's opinionated defaults for a pile of decisions you now have to make yourself — server framework choice, data-fetching pattern, deploy target — which is a real cost for a small team that just wants to ship. The extension ecosystem (vike-react, vike-vue, etc.) means version-matching across four+ repos instead of one, which is exactly the kind of monorepo-sprawl dependency hell Next.js avoids by being one package. The AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md files with an embedded instruction telling AI tools to auto-load an external llms.txt URL is a prompt-injection-adjacent pattern worth being cautious about if you're pointing an agent at this repo unsupervised.