Short answer: if you have no strong constraints, **React with Vite and React Router** is the lowest-regret default — biggest ecosystem, easiest hiring, most AI/tooling support, and you can find an answer to any problem you hit. But the better answer depends on what you're building.
**By situation:**
- **Content-heavy site** (blog, docs, marketing, ecommerce storefront): **Astro**. Ships almost no JS by default, and you can drop React/Vue/Svelte components into islands where you actually need interactivity.
- **App-like product, small team, want to move fast and enjoy it**: **SvelteKit** or **Nuxt (Vue)**. Both have noticeably better DX than React, less boilerplate, and coherent built-in answers for routing/data/state. Nuxt has the larger ecosystem of the two.
- **Need SEO + server rendering + a big ecosystem**: **Next.js**. Caveat: it's gotten complex. The App Router and React Server Components are a genuinely different mental model, and the caching behavior has confused a lot of people. Great if you need it, overkill if you don't.
- **Large team, long-lived enterprise app**: **Angular** or React. Angular is opinionated and batteries-included, which is a feature when you have 30 developers who need to agree on things.
- **Performance is the top priority**: **Solid** or Svelte. Fine-grained reactivity, no virtual DOM, small bundles. Smaller ecosystems, so budget time for writing your own integrations.
- **Mostly server-rendered with sprinkles of interactivity**: consider skipping the SPA framework entirely — Rails/Django/Laravel/Go plus **HTMX** or Alpine is a legitimate and much simpler stack.
**Two things people commonly get wrong:**
Reaching for a meta-framework by reflex. If you're building a dashboard behind a login, you don't need SSR, and Vite + a client-side router will be dramatically simpler to reason about.
Underweighting the ecosystem. The framework itself is a small fraction of the work. What matters more is whether there's a mature component library, auth solution, form library, and table component that fits your needs. React wins on this by a wide margin; Vue is solid; Svelte and Solid you'll occasionally build things yourself.
If you tell me what you're building — the type of app, team size, whether SEO matters, what you already know — I can give you a firmer recommendation. Also worth checking current versions and release notes yourself, since this space moves fast and my information has a cutoff.