I've been a big fan of TanStack start and have a few small apps (<10k users) in production running on TSS.
The DX is smooth, the defaults are sane, and things generally makes sense if that makes sense. There are plenty of skills available so Claude Code and Codex know how to work with it too.
If you're maybe finding Next a bit bloated these days, I'd recommend giving this a try. Plus Tanner, the creator, responds to almost every mention on Twitter so it's easy to get eyeballs on issues that you might face. :)
I have switched from the bloated mess of Nextjs to Vite+TSS and never looked back.
We are also currently inmidst a migration from NextJS to TanStack Start and it's worth for the performance and resource gains alone. NextJS' dev server takes around 3-4 GB memory after a few page click while TanStack / Vite consumes less than a GB.
This is something I noticed, originally I thought "AI" was the perfect tool for Vercel and Nextjs (current standard = future standard), but then I realized is the total opposite, their moat/stick is gone now, and Rouch that is smart I think knows this.
I switched a middle sized app to Tanstack Router + Vite while I was walking my dogs. Then 30 minuts-1 hour QA and it was done. This should have never happened before AI.
(I did switch because I was tired of the bloated network tab with 100 unnecesary RSC calls, the 5 seconds lag when clicking on an internal link, the 10 seconds "hot reload" after a change... I'm on a M4 MAX with 64GB of ram....)
Vercel's moat is DX in hosting, not NextJS. Consider, people who switch to TanStack Start still need a place to host and many would continue to choose Vercel.
This moat is rapidly disappearing though. Cloudflare is catching up, most apps (including TanStack Start) can be one-click deployed without configuration now.
Same principle applies, hosting in Railway has slightly worse UX, but with LLM's you don't need to write a single docker line anymore, so deploying on railway is way way less cumbersome than before, and you gain more control and less costs.
The react framework de jour. I wonder what would be the reason to rewrite react apps in 2027.
Thanks guys!
that said the documentation is rough, especially for their support for non-React frameworks