Why I Love The T3 Stack For My Web Development Projects
May 21, 2025
Hello peeps, today I am going to talk about the T3 stack (NextJS, TailwindCSS, TypeScript), what is it, and why I love it so much.
What Is The T3 Stack?
The T3 Stack is a web development technology stack the primarily consists of NextJS, TailwindCSS, and Typescript. (the 3 Ts, get it?). NextJS is there due to its strong TypeScript support.
To understand what makes this stack special you must first understand how is it to build a full-stack web application the "vanilla" way.
The Vanilla Way
If you are a React web developer you would need to use CRA (create-react-app) via Node.js bundler. After waiting ~30 seconds or more for the React app to create, you will then have the joyful time to give said app the features needed to become a full-stack capable app, manually... this includes giving the app full routing support, server side logic capabilities, server side rendering would be ideal, and many more things. And of course let's not forget that TypeScript support which will make the app less error-prone. And don't get me started about optimizing images and app bundle size optimization.
I am of course being sarcastic here, but I stand on that opinion. The development process using this method is slow, hard to maintain, and very error-prone. So much that the official website for CRA marks itself as deprecated and recommends other alternatives.
Come The T3 Stack
Build web apps with this stack just made it more fun and let me knew that web development doesn't have to be slow, hard to maintain, and error-prone. Let's start with NextJS, it's a lot to cover but in summary this framework alone is a selling point. It comes with easy app routing, api route handling, server-side rendering, dynamic rendering, static rendering, server actions, and more; all out of the box!
And then there is TailwindCSS. Think what you will about className spam but you gotta admit TailwindCSS makes creating styles easy. And configuring it ain't hard, in fact, the create-next-app cli tool configures it for you (its also optional). Furthermore, now in TailwindCSS v4, there is technically zero-config to be done; you just have to download the tailwindcss package and add @import "tailwindcss"; to your global css file and voilà.
Couple all of this with TypeScript and now you can rest assured that minimal bugs or errors will make it to production. This is because the TypeScript engine will nag at you whenever it sees something it don't like (like doing a conditional between a string and a number).
And about the bundler, I personally use bun which makes the app compile and build times very fast.
All of this combined makes the T3 stack one of the best ways to develop full stack web applications (in my opinion).
There Are Others
There are other tech stacks out there that accomplish similar if not the same results as the T3. I just feel at home in the T3. At the end of the day, use the tools that you like, and that ideally solve the problem best.