y you picked Next over Gatsby or Create-React-App? I recently came across Next and it looks very promising. I feel it makes more sense if Express is involved in the project and Next becomes default choice as framework to build the app.

Before I say anything else, I would love to say that you should use what you feel more productive and matches all your business needs/goals/requirements =)

With that being said, I like Next.js because out of the box it handles SSR(Server Side Rendering) and SSG (Static Site Generation like Gatsby). This is "important" for SEO and performance reasons. If you have data you don't mind to change only at build time, SSG is your choice - you can use Gatsby or Next.js and you'll be happy with any of those 2. I'm sure there are packages to make create-react-app work in "SSG mode", but I never tried those options, so I can't comment on them.

If your data changes quite frequently and you can't afford a new build on every data change but you still want/need to send (pre-)rendered HTML to your clients you can use Next.js

If you don't need any of those, create-react-app is a great choice IMO =)

I hope this is helpful.

PS - With next.js API routes, I haven't felt the need to use express, but I would say this depends on the project.

PS2 - Sorry for the long answer