Let me start by saying I didn’t go into Remix expecting to fall in love. In fact, like many devs, I had my reservations. I’d been working with Next.js for a few years, and while it wasn’t perfect, it felt comfortable. Stable. Safe. But curiosity (and a new project) pushed me to give Remix a real shot. After six months building a mid-sized admin dashboard with forms, charts, auth, and deployment on Cloudflare and later Vercel, I can tell you—Remix isn’t just hype. But it’s not perfect either.
First Impressions: Is Remix Overhyped?
I first stumbled on Remix during a late-night scroll through r/webdev. A thread titled “Is Remix really that good or just overhyped?” caught my eye. Some folks called it the best thing since sliced bread. Others had horror stories about loaders and layout data duplication. So I went in cautious, but curious.
Getting started was… okay. The CLI worked well, and the folder structure felt natural. But I won’t lie—early docs were not great. Remix had just moved to v2, and it was clear parts of the documentation hadn’t caught up yet. Still, I pieced things together, and within a few hours, I had a working skeleton of my app. Not bad.
What I Loved About Remix
- Performance by Design: Remix encourages full SSR and lean bundles by default. It feels like you’re writing modern web apps the way the web was meant to be built—HTML-first, progressive enhancement, no gimmicks.
- Data Loading Model: The way Remix uses loaders and actions feels clean and explicit. Fetching server-side data is straightforward, and form handling is amazing. I’m serious—forms in Remix are a dream. Especially stepped forms. I had flashbacks to Rails in the best way possible.
- Flexibility: One of Remix’s biggest strengths is its unopinionated deployment model. I deployed to Cloudflare Workers, then moved to Vercel. No issues either way. The app is just a request handler you can plug into anything—Express, Netlify, whatever. That freedom matters if you’re trying to stay away from vendor lock-in.
- Developer Experience: This one’s subjective, but I enjoyed working with Remix more than I expected. Things just made sense. I wasn’t constantly fighting the framework like I sometimes did with Next.
What I Didn’t Love
- Docs & Learning Curve: Remix’s documentation was a weak point—at least when I started. I often found myself searching through issues on GitHub or reading blog posts. Luckily, their Discord is active and very helpful. But still, compared to Next.js, Remix lacks the massive ecosystem and mature docs.
- Community & Stack Overflow Help: Remix is still relatively young. You won’t find as many solutions on Stack Overflow or Reddit. If you run into a weird edge case, be prepared to dig.
- No React Server Components (yet): For folks invested in the bleeding edge, Remix is more cautious. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but if you’re chasing RSC or fancy rendering strategies, you might be better off sticking with Next… for now.
Remix vs Next.js: The Million-Dollar Debate
I’ve seen this battle play out dozens of times on Reddit and Twitter. Which is better: Remix or Next? My answer? It depends.
If your project is content-heavy, static-site focused, or you need a massive ecosystem, Next.js is solid. It has great image optimization, strong TypeScript support, and first-class Vercel integration. But…
If you’re building complex apps with forms, SSR-first workflows, and you care about web standards, Remix shines. It’s cleaner, lighter, and forces you to think differently—in a good way.
Real-World Use Case: Building a CRUD Dashboard
My project was a dashboard app: user auth, role-based permissions, form-heavy UI (with some wizard steps), API integrations, and a basic analytics chart. Here’s how Remix handled each piece:
- Authentication: I used sessions and cookie-based auth. Super easy to set up with loaders.
- Forms: Again, stellar. Validation happens where it should—on the server. Optimistic UI updates were smoother than I expected.
- Data Fetching: One pain point I ran into was having to fetch the same user data in multiple loaders. But using root loaders and
useMatches()solved it. Honestly, this gets overblown by haters. - Charts & UI: Remix doesn’t care what charting or UI library you use. I used Chart.js and Tailwind without issues.
Community Opinions: The Split is Real
In the Reddit thread I mentioned earlier, one user said:
“I don’t even like JavaScript (a long and complicated relationship) but I loooove Remix. It is a breeze to deploy, too.”
Meanwhile, another developer said:
“I just started working on a Remix project. I already hate it. It assumes you will be fetching all the data at your page level… makes things unnecessarily complex.”
I totally get both takes. Remix forces you to handle data in a certain way. If you’re not aligned with that mindset, it can feel annoying. But once I leaned into the Remix philosophy, things got easier.
Hosting: Cloudflare, Vercel, or Something Else?
I hosted my Remix app on both Cloudflare Pages and Vercel. Honestly, both worked fine. Remix is surprisingly agnostic. But I will say, deploying to Vercel felt smoother—especially if you’re already using their platform. The devtools are slick, and CI/CD just works.
Is Remix the Future of React?
That’s a big question. For me personally, Remix feels like a natural evolution of React Router. It blends the old-school SSR mindset with modern DX. It’s not trying to reinvent everything. It’s trying to build better foundations. Whether it becomes the dominant framework is still up in the air, but it feels like a step forward.
Final Verdict: Should You Use Remix?
Here’s my take, six months in:
- Use Remix if:
- You’re building apps with complex forms
- You like SSR-first architectures
- You want a flexible deployment strategy
- You care about performance and web fundamentals
- Avoid Remix if:
- You rely heavily on RSC
- You need a massive plugin ecosystem
- You don’t want to spend time learning a new mental model
Remix isn’t perfect. But it is powerful, thoughtful, and—once you get the hang of it—really fun to use. I’ve built apps with React, Vue, Next, SvelteKit, and even good ol’ jQuery. Remix sits somewhere near the top of that list for me now.
And to be fair, even if it’s a bit overhyped in some circles, it earned that hype with real developer-focused decisions. So yeah, I’ll be using it again.
This is my Remix review. Honest, tested, and unfiltered.
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