Introduction
People keep telling me TanStack Start is kind of a big deal, and I wanted to know if that holds up or not. I've been spending a lot of time at conferences lately, and TanStack Start comes up quite often in conversation. The community is split if server components is the right answer. TanStack Start has gone the opposite direction with it's clean client-side first components approach, with lot so ways to call server-side code, even in the same component.
I'm a Vue and Nuxt person most days, so I'm not here to dunk on anyone's framework. What I want to figure out is simpler: are there specific things TanStack Start does that Next.js and Nuxt don't, and are they good enough to switch for?
After some research I have come up with three things I really like about TanStack Start. These things alone aren't probably enough for me to switch, but I'm getting close.
If you'd like to watch a video instead, check this out!
Prerequisites
- Node.js 22+
- Comfort with React and TypeScript
- You do not need any Next.js or TanStack experience
What we're building
A GitHub user lookup. You type a username, the app fetches that user from the GitHub API on the server, and renders their profile. It's a perfect app to show these three features.
You can find the full code in the
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