head to head · open source
gatsby vs nextra
gatsby has 55,939 GitHub stars, 10,115 forks, 450 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nextra has 13,922 stars, 1,415 forks, 346 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. gatsby leads on adoption by 302% (55,939 vs 13,922 stars). gatsby is written in JavaScript under MIT; nextra is written in TypeScript under MIT. gatsby has attracted 18% as many forks as stars, nextra 10%. gatsby was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (react, static-site-generator), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| gatsby | nextra | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 56K | ★ 14K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-07-31 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 1.4K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick gatsby if
- You weight community size — 56K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick nextra if
- You want the nextra feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and nextra fits your workflow better
About gatsby
Gatsby is a free and open source, React based framework for building websites and applications, released under the MIT license and written primarily in JavaScript. It combines the control and scalability of dynamically rendered sites with the speed of static site generation, and it sits in the JavaScript and React ecosystem as a static site generator, a compiler, and a GraphQL driven build tool. The project has been developed for roughly eleven years, carries 55,939 stars and 10,117 forks on GitHub, and currently has 450 open issues.
read the full gatsby overview →
About nextra
Nextra is a simple, powerful and flexible site generation framework, built on Next.js and written in TypeScript, for developers and teams who want to author documentation or content sites in Markdown and MDX inside a React application.
read the full nextra overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is gatsby or nextra more popular?
gatsby has 55,939 GitHub stars and nextra has 13,922. gatsby has the larger community by that measure.
Are gatsby and nextra free?
Both are open source. gatsby is licensed under MIT and nextra under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between gatsby and nextra?
gatsby is written in JavaScript and nextra in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, gatsby or nextra?
Choose gatsby if you want the larger community (55,939 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose nextra if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.