Why developers love to hate Gatsby.js instead of using it

Let’s be honest: sometimes, it’s easier to hate on something than to give it a fair shot. Hate Gatsby.js seems to be one of those tools in the development world that people either swear by or go out of their way to bash. But why does it attract so much shade?

The truth is, Gatsby makes it easy for developers to hate on it, and that says more about devs than it does about the framework itself.

Why is it easy to hate Gatsby.js

Here’s why it's easier to jump on the hate train instead of giving Gatsby the credit it probably deserves.

It's got "Overkill" written all over it

First, Gatsby is often seen as a massive over-engineering project wrapped in a trendy package. It’s the kind of tool that feels like it’s trying too hard to be “everything you’ll ever need.”

For simple static sites, Gatsby can be like showing up to a casual backyard BBQ wearing a tuxedo. Do we need GraphQL just to fetch some Markdown files? Probably not. But Gatsby insists on it anyway.

Gatsby treats GraphQL like a hammer for every nail. Need to pull in some data? Cool, here’s GraphQL—now go write a query even if a simple REST fetch would do. Sure, it’s “powerful,” but it’s also complete overkill for small projects. Most devs don’t need GraphQL for 99% of use cases. What they need is simplicity. But Gatsby insists on complexity like it’s a badge of honor.

It’s almost as if someone sat down and thought, “How can we make this more painful than it needs to be?”

And they did.

You thought Gatsby was a straightforward React framework? Think again. Between its convoluted Webpack config, Babel setup, and custom GraphQL layer, you’ll spend more time configuring than coding.

Gatsby is supposed to help devs build faster, but it feels more like it’s designed to make sure you stay buried under layers of tooling forever.

For many devs, the thought of wrestling with GraphQL and configuring a complex build pipeline for what should be a straightforward static site feels like a punishment, not a feature.

The Plugin hell

“Just install a plugin” — every Gatsby fan ever. Sure, Gatsby's plugin ecosystem looks great from the outside, but here’s the reality: you’re going to end up in dependency hell sooner or later. And by sooner, I mean on day one.

Installing plugins becomes a necessity rather than a choice, and before you know it, your project is bloated with dependencies you barely understand. And let’s not even talk about when these plugins break, which they often do, leaving you to sift through GitHub issues and Stack Overflow for some solution.

You want to build a simple blog, but suddenly, you’re stuck solving plugin version conflicts. You’ve got one plugin needing gatsby-plugin-sharp at version X and another plugin that breaks if you’re not on version Y.

Congratulations, your simple build now feels like you’re diffusing a bomb. Why are we doing this again?

It's like being trapped in IKEA with a complex piece of furniture that has missing screws and instructions in Swedish—yes, you’ll probably figure it out, but was it worth the headache?

Build time slog

Static site generation is supposed to make your life easier, right? Well, with Gatsby, that’s true... until it isn’t.

Gatsby loves to brag about its blazing speed—until you actually build something of substance. The more data you add, the more you’ll be wondering if Gatsby is secretly mining crypto while you wait.

A few blog posts? Fine, 10-second builds.

But the second you introduce real-world complexity like dynamic data or multiple data sources, the build times skyrocket. What’s that? Incremental builds? Sure, if they actually worked reliably.

As if local builds weren’t bad enough, Gatsby’s build times murder your CI/CD pipelines. Need to deploy updates frequently? Not with Gatsby. Unless your company is willing to wait 30 minutes every time you push a change, you might as well grab a deck of cards while your pipeline runs.

You can keep playing your fav card game because Gatsby doesn’t allow you to optimize the build process.

Gatsby has its own way of doing things, and if you don’t like it, tough luck. You’re stuck waiting through long build processes while Gatsby churns through every single page, even the ones that haven’t changed.

Why put up with this when you could be using a framework that doesn’t make you want to take up knitting while your builds process?

"Better" Alternatives

Next.js exists. Nuxt.js exists. SvelteKit exists. Heck, even Jekyll still exists. These are all frameworks that do a lot of what Gatsby does but without the overwhelming baggage.

They don’t force you into the same rigid structure. They don’t bog you down with unnecessary complexity for simple tasks. The moment you realize there’s something better—or at least more intuitive—for your specific use case, the Gatsby appeal quickly fades.

Gatsby’s not bad at what it does, but it's not exactly irreplaceable, either.

Read about all the differences: Gatsby vs Next vs Nuxt: Key Features and Differences

Developer Experience is not as smooth as promised

Let’s talk DX (developer experience), the buzzword we’re all sick of hearing but still care about.

Gatsby claims to provide a great developer experience with hot-reloading, local dev servers, and plenty of plugins to speed up common tasks. But then reality kicks in: hot-reloading doesn’t always work, the dev server crashes occasionally, and some plugins cause more headaches than they solve.

• Hot-reloading failure: Hot-reloading is a lie Gatsby tells to keep you on the hook. You’ll spend more time waiting for hot-reloads than actually coding. And when it stops working (which it frequently does), you’ll be forced to restart your entire dev server, completely killing your flow.
• Weird, random build errors: Ever been blindsided by Gatsby throwing an error for no clear reason? “Error in plugin 'gatsby-transformer-remark'. Please see your config.” But the config is fine. You didn’t change anything! The framework just decided it had enough of your project and now refuses to cooperate. You’ll spend hours debugging nonsense like this instead of building features.

When a framework promises you a seamless experience and then delivers something half-baked, as a developer, nothing's worse than a framework that promises a smooth experience but delivers frustration.

Challenging serverless and dynamic integrations

Gatsby shines when it's building out static sites, but things get murky when you need serverless functions, authentication, or dynamic data that updates in real time. Sure, you can get these things to work, but Gatsby often feels like it's working against you when you try to push it beyond static content.

Static first, dynamic last

Gatsby is built on the philosophy of static site generation, which means it’s designed to pre-build everything during the build process. That’s awesome for performance, but it’s terrible when you need dynamic functionality like user authentication, serverless functions, or live data fetching.

• Real-time updates? Not happening.

Since Gatsby generates your site at build time, any data that changes after the build won’t be reflected until the next build. This means you’re stuck rebuilding your site every time you want to update content.

• Server-rendering support… Maybe not the best feature

Gatsby tries to offer server-side rendering (SSR), but if you need dynamic routing, session-based data, or real-time user interaction, you’ll end up wrestling with Gatsby’s limitations or turning to Next.js, which handles SSR much more gracefully. Gatsby’s "SSR" support is more of a workaround compared to Next.js, where it’s been baked in from the beginning.

Why Gatsby's SSR is bad?

While Gatsby introduced SSR support with version 4, it’s still primarily optimized for static site generation (SSG). Here’s why Gatsby's SSR implementation is not up to par:

1. Performance: Gatsby’s SSR introduces additional server-side processing time. Static pages built ahead of time are fast, but SSR pages are rendered dynamically, which leads to slower response times and poor performance, especially for larger sites.
2. Cold start delays: Gatsby’s SSR can suffer from cold start delays, particularly on serverless platforms. These delays mean the first request to a page can take noticeably longer, which is a significant drawback for sites with real-time data or frequent content updates.
3. Plugins: Most of Gatsby’s plugins and tools are designed around static content. This means that many plugins don’t work as intended when using SSR, causing compatibility issues and headaches for developers trying to mix SSG and SSR workflows.
4. Data fetching: When switching to SSR, you have to move away from the well-documented graphql queries and use the more complex getServerData API. This introduces another layer of complexity when dealing with data fetching, especially if some pages are static and others are server-rendered.

As you can see it’s not impossible to handle dynamic content in Gatsby—but it sure doesn’t feel like it was designed for it.

SEO, but at what cost?

Gatsby is supposed to be a dream for SEO, especially since it’s built as a static site generator.

And sure, on paper, a fully pre-rendered static site should be an SEO dream: fast load times, pre-built HTML, and minimal JavaScript execution. But when you start adding dynamic content and third-party scripts without messing up your SEO becomes a challenge.

Here are the challenges:

Static-first SEO doesn’t play well with dynamic content

Gatsby’s static site generation is fantastic for SEO if your content never changes. But as soon as you start working with dynamic content, Gatsby’s SEO benefits become a lot harder to manage.

• Dynamic content loaded client-side: Because Gatsby generates everything statically at build time, any content that’s fetched or rendered client-side isn’t available to search engine crawlers. This means that if your site depends on API data that’s pulled in via client-side JavaScript, search engines like Google won’t see it—leading to huge SEO blind spots.
• Late-loading content: You might think, “Well, I’ll just load dynamic content on the client and use JavaScript for SEO tags.” Sure, but here’s the problem: crawlers aren’t guaranteed to execute JavaScript, or they might execute it late. By the time your client-side data has loaded, the crawler has already moved on, and your page ranks lower because the content it needs to index simply isn’t there. It’s a big gamble, and in many cases, a losing one.
• Static tags in a dynamic world: With static content, your meta tags are easy to manage. You build your pages and generate your tags at build time. But when you add dynamic content—especially when pulling data from APIs—you need to generate these tags dynamically based on the data. Unfortunately, Gatsby isn’t built to regenerate these SEO tags after the initial build. This means you’ll have to add custom code or implement hacks using React Helmet or similar libraries to manually manage your dynamic SEO tags—adding another layer of complexity.
• SEO for user-generated content: Let’s say you’re pulling in dynamic content, like blog posts or comments, from an API. You need each page to have unique meta descriptions and canonical URLs for proper indexing. With Gatsby, achieving this dynamically can be a pain, because the framework is designed to handle SEO at build-time, not at run-time.

Lazy-loading affecting SEO

Gatsby heavily relies on lazy-loading assets like images and JavaScript, which is great for performance but can hurt your SEO if not done correctly.

• Images and JavaScript: Google cares about how quickly content loads, especially images. While Gatsby’s image plugin does offer optimized images with lazy-loading and responsive formats, these images may not load in time for search engine crawlers to index them properly. If Google sees placeholders instead of actual content, it can assume your page is incomplete or poorly optimized, harming your rankings. This is especially a problem with slower network connections or heavily dynamic pages.

Many developers spend more time tweaking their Gatsby configuration to handle SEO edge cases (lazy loading images, proper schema tags, etc.) than they would on any other platform.

Does all this hate Gatsbyjs make it dead

The hate towards Gatsby isn’t because it’s inherently a bad tool. It’s because developers love efficiency, and Gatsby often feels less efficient.

Sure, it’s easy to hate Gatsby for its shortcomings, but we need to acknowledge its strengths too—because yes, it has plenty:

Incredible static performance

When it comes to pure static site generation, Gatsby is a beast. Gatsby’s ability to pre-render everything at build time means that it delivers lightning-fast sites straight out of the gate. Once the build process is over (yes, it can be slow), Gatsby’s performance is hard to beat.

Plugin ecosystem—when it works

We’ve ranted about plugin hell, but let’s not forget that Gatsby’s plugin ecosystem is also one of its greatest strengths. If you’re building a standard static site, Gatsby has a plugin for nearly everything. From handling image optimization to adding SEO metadata, Gatsby's plugins can make development easier and faster, especially for developers who are less inclined to reinvent the wheel.

Extremely secure

Gatsby is arguably one of the safest frameworks you can choose, especially when it comes to deploying static sites. Since Gatsby generates static HTML, there’s no database or server-side processing, which means less surface area for security vulnerabilities.

• No server, no problem: Traditional CMSs like WordPress are notorious for being hacked due to outdated plugins, brute-force attacks, and server exploits. Gatsby, on the other hand, doesn’t have a server to attack. Once the site is built and deployed, there’s practically no risk of common attack vectors like SQL injections or DDoS attacks because everything is already pre-rendered and cached.
• Out-of-the-box SSL and encryption: Gatsby’s integration with platforms like Netlify and Vercel means you can automatically deploy your site with HTTPS encryption, which is crucial for SEO and user trust. This is one less thing to worry about when it comes to securing your site.

So, is Gatsby Dead?

Absolutely not. Gatsby is still alive and well, especially in niche markets where static site generation, performance optimizations, and complex data integrations are prioritized. When used for the right type of project, Gatsby is an incredibly powerful tool that can deliver results few other frameworks can match.

Why developers still choose Gatsby:

1. Performance beast for static sites: If you’re building a marketing site, a blog, or an eCommerce store with relatively static content, Gatsby’s performance is still hard to beat.
2. Extensive ecosystem: The plugin ecosystem is second to none, allowing developers to easily add advanced features like image optimization, SEO improvements, and integrations with CMS platforms.
3. Unified data layer with GraphQL: For complex projects with multiple data sources, Gatsby’s GraphQL layer can be a massive asset, simplifying the process of pulling data from different APIs, markdown files, and CMSs.

Find out: Why do these 15 devs still choose Gatsby.js over Next.js?

Maybe the real problem isn’t Gatsby. Maybe it’s because developers have grown accustomed to things being simpler, more intuitive, and less demanding.

Conclusion: Is it hate or is it frustration?

Maybe the hate isn’t really about the framework itself, but about the expectations Gatsby fails to meet for many developers. It’s not a bad framework, but it’s also not a universally loved one, and that’s okay. Not every tool is for everyone, and Gatsby might just be one of those things that’s easier to criticize than to fully embrace.

In the end, hating Gatsby is easy because the alternative—learning it, mastering its quirks, and making it work for you—feels unnecessarily hard. And when you have other options, why wouldn’t you take the path of least resistance?