Next.js is great but can't compare to Laravel, they are not for the same use case. Laravel comes with an ORM, a job queue, a mail framework... And it can also scaffold a complete auth system for you

You can just add Bull/Temporal, Prisma/Knex and Braze and you can swap stuff when needed but I understand that for new people it's nice to have everything integrated when starting out.

Still seems like most people write separate backend and Nest.js is most popular. I am not a biggest fan yet personally.

How so? Nextjs only offers ssr and routing. Nothing else. Not even close to the full stack functionality you find in a default laravel or rails project.

It also has API routes and Middleware. But yeah, Laravel includes more by default. With Next.js, you need to pick a few more tools to go along with your stack. E.g. Next.js, NextAuth, Prisma, SQL database. You end up in a similar place, it's just not all part of the same package. That may or may not be beneficial for your team.

And the advantage of Next is that you can leverage React components server side and client side, and share code between them.

Laravel Livewire is pretty nice for basic interactivity, which is all many sites need, but React becomes useful as soon as you start needing app-like features. At that point, using Next, which is already plugged in to that ecosystem, is a very nice experience.

Next is great for static sites, too, so nowadays I prefer putting my time into that vs. fragmenting between a more purely server-side framework like Laravel.

Inertiajs is the right solution if you need more interactivity than livewire. It can be used with react or vuejs out of the box (probably svelte too but haven't looked it up).

Next.js is great as long as what you're building is not much more than a landing page, or you're proxying to a real backend system (by another team, etc).

Trying to build a "full stack" application with just Next.js is suiciding everyone that comes to the project after you leave.