Is GatsbyJS Officially Dead?

[JR-Carroll]

I can't get Netlify to respond, and I read rumors online suggesting the original GatsbyJS team rage-quit or was let-go (whatever) Netlify post-merger -- whatever the facts, I have several GatsbyJS-based projects I need to know if I should migrate to another framework.

1. Is GatsbyJS officially dead or is it just dead-silent? I see 'fix' commits in the repo, but no major dev. And the blogs between GatsbyJS and Netlify are pretty silent for the last 1-1.5years.
2. For those migrating away, what's the preferred equivalent framework? NextJS? Nuxt? or?
3. What's the real story with what happened to GatsbyJS? I've LOVED Gatsby, and have built a mini-side-hustle that's done very well with GatsbyJS, but I feel abandoned and I want closure.

Thanks GatsbyJS-residual-team! I miss you guys and hope everything is OK!

[jcarroll-ceo]

Following up on this thread. I would really appreciate the maintainers perspective on GatsbyJS future. I have projects that are dependent on this and I need to advise my clients.

Any community member thoughts on the health and survivability of GatsbyJS as it lives in the Netlify-ecosystem?

(apologies, not trying to pretend Im another account -- Im the OP, just happened to check status while I was in my other account).

[kremalicious]

It has been abandoned and therefore can be considered dead, see the silence of maintainers on #38696.

Next, Astro, Remix are all good alternatives.

[tiggeymone]

As far as I'm concerned, Netlify is losing a lot in terms of reputation for what it's doing with Gatsby. I can't recall another operation so deliberately harmful to the JS community as Netlify's acquisition of Gatsby. An entire team laid off overnight, a SaaS with thousands of active projects trashed, and lots of "don't worry, everything is fine" messages while the building is on fire.

I hope for more transparency from the Netlify team in the future, because there's a big difference between saying "Gatsby may no longer be cutting-edge, but we're focusing on stability" and not having a significant commit in almost a year.

I still have several projects in Gatsby, and I can't find a valid alternative when it comes to theme shadowing. It doesn't seem like Astro supports it. Do you have any valid suggestions?

[McLeodSean]

@tiggeymone - Would love to know if you come across an alternative specifically for shadowing. It seems to be a fairly niche feature, but it's been incredibly valuable for us and is pretty much the only thing stopping us from migrating elsewhere.

The only viable alternatives I've found are:

1. Rolling a custom webpack config using webpack-theme-component-shadowing - I'd prefer to move away from Webpack
2. vite-plugin-blueprint - An obscure and unmaintained Vite plugin

[JR-Carroll]

I've had it narrowed down to Astro and Next for awhile, but I am very allergic to going Astro for the very simple reason that Astro appears to be a kissing-cousins to GatsbyJS/Netlifys model. Say I run with them and they implode just like Netlify/GatsbyJS - shame on me!

[munawar-js]

We are actually considering to switch our gatsby-starter-foundation to Astro, how sure are you about this.

[JR-Carroll]

Sure about what? Astro going the way of Gatsby? Im not certain of that at all. My comment is entirely fear based given the limited research I've done on Astro.

Im not interested in good-willed private enterprises that play the cash-grab game. I'm just looking for a stable framework to deploy to a stable platform. It's going to cost me a lot of time, which is money, to move my projects away from Gatsby. I accept that things like this happen, but the way GatsbyJS/Netlify handled this really doesn't sit right with me and it feels like Im prematurely migrating away from Gatsby when it could have been a viable option for many years to come.

For now, I'm personally picking NextJS. Yes... privately owned by Vercel, but my research suggest it's much more versatile than Astro (this all comes from anecdotes off of Reddit -- ask me again in a few months if I made the right choice). The other thing that makes me raise an eyebrow is that Astro has some component architecture that sounds like it may not mix well. AKA going Astro might be a one-way trip that makes migrating away harder? Again, just random threads on Reddit. I feel like that with NextJS I can easily migrate, get back up and running, and if I need to migrate from NextJS to Astro that seems like a possibility.

My two (fear-driven and illogical) cents.

[rbmedia]

I fear to experience with Astro the same I experienced with Gatsby: just to have a very comfortable tool until it goes wrong (my opinion).
I am back to plain React Apps, server components and custom data-API to serve content from a CMS the way I need it.

[rbmedia]

I stopped using Gatsby 3 months ago. Netlify is neither an option for future projects. Transparency and stability is what I need. The low activity on issues speak for itself...

[munawar-js]

We also stopped, now building new template as alternate for gatsby-starter-foundation with Astro

[rbmedia]

I will not adapt any "in-between" development solution anymore, but use the main JS frameworks. Maybe I am wrong...

[munawar-js]

What you are saying is correct, initially i considered next.js which is my goto framework. But for static blog astro does the job

[JWizerd]

I have to say, in my experience as a dev over the past decade, I've never seen a situation like this so poorly handled. Netlify seems to have essentially ghosted an entire community to increase profits and cut out competition. I think they are failing to see that Gatsby, being a relatively stable and well architected framework, would probably be easy to maintain and could open up new profit opportunities like rolling out proper functioning incremental build pipelines which therefore would given incentive for existing customers to upgrade to enterpise tiers on their platform. But, in the process of boosting their profit margins they are going to be losing customers to other frameworks and cloud hosting platforms i.e. Next.js, Vercel, Hydrogen & Oxygen (Shopify).

I hope this message reaches you Netlify and lights a fire under your a$$ to pick up support for this framework because just ghosting a community is not a good look for your image. At least have the courage to make an official statement that you're not going to be supporting the framework in the future... cowards.

[cordial]

well said.

[olehpratsko]

I feel exactly the same. What a shame that the stupid younger brother of Gatsby (Next.js) hyped the market like Gatsby was never there.

[olehpratsko]

For those migrating away, what's the preferred equivalent framework? NextJS? Nuxt? or?

I have more than 5 years of experience in Gatsby and some of my current projects are still working on Gatsby as a base framework (ex. https://minify-js.com/). Working with Gatsby was a great journey, I completely forgot about many painful points I struggled with in the previous life before meeting Gatsby. Hovever luck of support and demand on the webdev market, made me considering other options.

Let me start with Astro:

While it supports React components, Astro is not React based framework at all. It has it's own syntax (.astro), the syntax also looked much like Vue. It also reminded me about the old Jekyll, it actually looks like Jekyll written with JS. It might be easier in setting up static blog or some simple few pages website, but the general approach is much different from what we used to working with Gatsby.
I started questioning myself, why should I learn new no-name framework like Astro, if I can learn something like Vue-based Nuxt with great community and support, so I dropped the idea picking up Astro and moved to the more obvious Next.js.

Then I had 1 year of enterprise development with Next.js:
It was quick to pick up. Familiar ecosystem, modules, directory structure, but the devil hides in details. Next.js is an SSR framework and with introduction of server components, I'd say SSR is a primary way to build Next.js applications. While SSG is possible, Next.js has one important feature missing to make SSG working as good as in Gatsby. It doesn't have any native Data Layer. At the beggining I was straggling a lot. Working with Gatsby I completely forgot about doing direct requests to API endpoints, debugging API responses and other frustrating things related to the data fetching. Next.js reminded me everything and it really feels like a few steps back in my personal development flow. I couldn't get used to the new reality of exactly the same React ecosystem with pure data fetching, so at this point I don't consider Next.js as framework for my future projects. Of course, your experience could be different.

I started my personal portfolio project one month ago to summarise my 10 years in the industry and find some new opportunities and I got back to Gatsby for this project. For me personally, Gatsby works better then Next.js or Astro, but I also started exploring Nuxt.js as an alternative to Gatsby. I'm surprised, but it looks like Nuxt.js is very similar to Gatsby in the core concepts and as a big plus for me Nuxt.js is very opinionated. It handles lots of problems OOB, and for the problems it doesn't handle, it has external modules, just like Gatsby+plugins. It has connection modules for different CMS and service providers, just like Gatsby+source. It's based on Vue, but I don't see any not-next.js option based on React to replace Gatsby.

Well, I'd say I'll stick with Gatsby till the moment I'd be confident enough in development with Nuxt.js.