Tweet by FredKSchott

September 23, 2025

Cloudflare's blog post on this nails it IMO and is a huge validation on the original idea behind Astro: Client-side SPAs are great for dynamic, complex web apps. Tanstack is a joy to use. It pairs great with Astro when you need dynamic content (dashboards, search pages, web apps, etc). I genuinely love it. Client-side SPAs fall apart for high-performant content sites. Too much JavaScript, poor performance, poor SEO, etc. Content fails when you treat it like a big application! Older JavaScript frameworks tried to solve this by throwing complexity at the problem. SSR, ISR, PPR, client/server components, Isomorphic rendering... but complexity comes at a cost, and we're still here waiting for some of these promised solutions/bets to pay off. The reality is that client-side SPAs are actually great! Simplicity is a strength! A great web app built with Tanstack Router + local-first Tanstack DB will feel faster than any server-rendered application. The performance and complexity cost of adding SSR to a web app isn't always worth it. Astro and Tanstack are two sides of the same coin. We have our strengths and weaknesses, but together both cover the entire spectrum of what you might want to build on the web.

Author
FredKSchott
Date
September 23, 2025
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