2026-02-22 why flowershow vs use nextjs and vercel or cloudflare

Or any other build tools where you build yourself. …

Or more broadly: when to use flowershow vs build yourself with a given tool.

Who is this (comparison) for? Who asks this question: for avg obsidian user not even a question as they don't want nextjs in their vault? … so guess this is more power-users / devs etc
Purpose: Make clear the value adds flowershow offers: why is this more than "nextjs in a box", why not just use nextjs and cloudflare/vercel for deployment.
- Show when to choose which option (sometimes nextjs etc is better)
- Possible extra: demonstrate how you can do X in NextJS or 11ty or whatever in Flowershow

Alternatively: What would it take to build this yourself?

Pollution (have to add code-y stuff): Pollutes your docs / kb or whatever with build code …
- Your content repo ends up with a bunch of code in it … (not great for tracking and for non-tech team members … ).
- if you have e.g. an obsidian vault you don't want other stuff in it especially a bunch of random code …
Maintenance:
- Even with AI, you still need to maintain nextjs/11ty or whatever you use.
Markdown (the basics): what does it take to setup vercel for markdown (more than you think!)
Tailwind: another thing to configure and handle

Feature list (that you have to integrate and maintain)

Math
Mermaid
Wiki links
SEO support
Social previews
Table of contents (done well)
Site table of contents
Navbar and footer (customizable easily)
Themes!
Tailwind support
HTML publishing
Asset handling
Image optimization …
Auto-publish from github (with nothing to be added, no nextjs code etc!)
Data display
Blog listings
(Obsidian) bases support
More …

We could make this into some kind of exhaustive animation to really give people the sense. of a little video. well isn't it just nextjs? and then i add this. then i add this, then i add this … (this was our own experience).

Also we wanted to publish a lot of stuff. even if 10-20m each time that is major friction and stuff i have then have to maintain across 10 different websites. even just setting up for basic markdown was a hassle.

When you do want nextjs etc

Full customizability: you want to control every pixel …
You have a lost of JS / React interactivity or you are even building a rich app
- Yes flowershow can do some JS and we support MDX but it won't be like a full nextjs app
  - NB: you can do a lot in flowershow. for example you can load js etc

Appendix: What happens if flowershow goes away …

This may be another separate question that should be in FAQs. Why people like self-hosted …

Everything in flowershow is open source
Built on NextJS core so you could just migrate (with some effort - but less than if you built from scratch!)