Vue and React are undoubtedly among the most popular JavaScript frameworks. Even though they have different philosophies, they are similar in some aspects. Let's dive into these two frameworks and understand how they stack up against each other.

If you do anything but mention, "which framework is better for front end development." You will have the otherwise pacifist developer community up in arms immediately! This question, "which framework is a better choice?" is a hot topic of debate and results in a lot of altercation between the developer communities. Eventually, as far as the developer is concerned, it's a personal preference. However, it always helps if you can put some context behind the choice.

Origins

React was developed by an internal team at Facebook, whereas Vue was created out of a solo quest. While React had its genesis at Facebook, it was primarily designed to find a better way to code and make the front end more responsive, Vue was Evan You's brainchild ( ex-Googler ). Vue has a massive following and garners support from a diverse set of supporters spread across the world. React considers itself more of a library than a framework, its minimalistic and focused on UI building. Both hel

Where do they differ?

With React, you do not have access to a standard router or features like an application-wide state management solution. You would need to reach out to the React community for community-managed packages for such solutions. On the other hand, Vue comes with a router and state management solution, which is maintained by the Vue core team.

In React, there is no specific HTML and Java Script separation. There is a section for Java Script function and a feature known as JSX, which tells React to render the particular section of your HTML content. In Vue, there is a stricter separation of HTML and JavaScript, and it allows us to manipulate HTML with a specific syntax, which is exclusively understood by Vue when the code s parsed.

As far as the learning curve is concerned, React may require more effort at the beginning for a developer to get used to the merged version of HTML and JavaScript and the introduction of JSX. Whereas it commonly believed that Vue is simpler to learn, you can get started by just adding an import to an HTML file and start seeing results. It also helps that it separates the HTML and JavaScript. So it’s more comfortable to relate.

In terms of performance, React, and Vue have similar startup performance, that's when the framework/library of Vue and React gets downloaded to the end-user along with your code. The bundle sizes should be similar to both these frameworks, so the startup performance should be the same. As far as run time performance is concerned, it does get influenced by your code and the behind-the-scenes working of the framework. You may get different performance scores depending on the use case. So there is no definite answer here.

Popularity

If you go by Google trends, Vue is slightly more popular than React. In the US, however, React is more popular. Another measure can be npm downloads. React is downloaded much more than Vue, almost four times more. Compare Reacts 6 million downloads a week to Vue's 1.5 million. In terms of employability, React overshadows Vue by a considerable margin. There are 42% more projects in React as compared to Vue. The number of jobs also narrates a similar story. For example, there are twelve times more jobs for React than for Vue in indeed.com and five times more in LinkedIn.

Future

Both React and Vue are under active development, and they have been around for some time, with React just being slightly longer than Vue. React does get the impetus from being part of Facebook, and Facebook adds the necessary stability to React's future. But one cannot discount the growing popularity of Vue. It is observed that with time more gifted developers are becoming part of the Core team at Vue.

The changes in both frameworks are evolving step by step. New features are added continuously, and the old ones are being truncated or deprecated. As it happens, there is no fixed schedule for React releases. The most talked-about major feature from React is called Hooks. (Hooks was released with React 16.8 in February 2019, which is almost a couple of years back). Hooks help in improving code reuse and results in better code decomposition and defaults. Vue is at Vue 3 with the release planned in Q3 of 2020. Evan You promised Vue 3 to be faster, smaller, and more maintainable. For further deep dive, have a look at the State of Vue deck.

Who uses these Frameworks?

React is a JavaScript library that was open-sourced by Facebook in 2013, and it's great for building modern applications. Many multi-billion dollar companies rely on React, apart from Facebook, React is used by Airbnb, Microsoft, Slack, Dropbox, Whatsapp, Instagram, Yahoo, Netflix, New York Times, and Codeacademy.

Vue had its origins in China, but today it’s a globally adopted framework. Big-name companies who use Vue are Alibaba, Adobe, Reuters, Xiaomi, Codeship, Behance, BuzzFeed, Nintendo, Grammarly, and Trustpilot.

Conclusion

The decision on a framework of choice is never that straight forward. You have to consider factors like speed, community, learning curve, and maturity, to name a few. Both React and Vue score well in these areas. That's what makes a choice difficult.

React as a framework has matured over time. It is backed by Facebook, which tells it is not going to go away any time soon. The market has widely accepted it, and the number of jobs reflects real demand. People are developing more in React than in any other framework. React should be your choice for designing scalable products; the framework is modular and efficient.

On the other hand, Vue is continuously growing, with more and more contributors teaming up across the world, it is natural to expect Vue to keep on improving. It is relatively new but has a lot of enthusiasm from the street. Expect Vue to be competitive as it brings in flexibility and simplicity.