Imagine you’re building a React app
Imagine you’re building a React app.
How do you decide between these two options:
1. Traditional SPA
2. React Server Components (RSC)
SPA benefits:
✅ Proven and mature.
✅ Lets us use more of the React ecosystem of third party libraries.
✅ Simple. Easy to understand.
✅ Cheaper and easier to host.
RSC benefits:
✅ Likely renders the first page faster.
✅ Likely saves bandwidth (each RSC adds zero K to bundle).
✅ Use heavy libraries solely on the server to save bandwidth
✅ Requires less code for data fetching (may even call the DB directly instead of hitting an API).
Given these tradeoffs, if we already have a REST/GraphQL API, or we want cheap, simple hosting, I lean toward SPA.
If we don’t have a web API, or performance is critical, I lean toward RSC.