React vs Vue – Which One to Choose for Your Frontend Development?

React and Vue are two of the most popular choices for JavaScript-based web app development, making it challenging to decide which one is right for your project. This blog post provides an overview, including fundamental understanding, statistics, features, apps built with each, brands using them, as well as their benefits and limitations. It also covers key similarities, differences, and more.

Are you in search of the best front-end technology for your web app development project? If so, you understand the value of having a robust web presence in this technology-driven world to stay competitive in the market.

Belonging to the technology domain, we experiment with different technologies and dive deep into them to understand and help our clients engineer their dream digital products. When it comes to web development, JavaScript frameworks and libraries have evolved to become the most popular and widely utilized.

Over time, developers have gained access to more frontend development technologies and tools, such as Angular, React, and Vue, each offering competitive benefits, making the selection process trickier.

However, the choice should be made based on the project requirements and the expertise of the development team.

After covering an in-depth analysis of Angular vs React and Angular vs Vue, in this blog, we showcase our research on Vue vs React to help you find the best frontend technology for your next web app development project.

Let’s start the debate between React and Vue!

React vs Vue – A Quick Overview

While both React and Vue are favored technologies for numerous web app development projects, deciding between them can be challenging. To ensure you make the right choice in JavaScript technology, it’s crucial to understand what each offers individually for web development.

Here are some fundamental overviews of both technologies:

What is React?

Many users often misunderstand ReactJS as a JavaScript framework, but it’s an open-source JavaScript UI library developed by Facebook in 2011 to build web apps with a robust interface.

ReactJS emerged as one of the strongest frontend development technologies, challenging existing ones such as Angular 1, Backbone.js, and jQuery.

Let’s look at a few statistics about React:

• On GitHub, React has 1644+ contributors and has received 216K+ stars.
• With this huge community of contributors, there are over 13.55M+ live websites built using React.
• According to the StackOverflow survey 2023, React.js was the most popular web frontend technology with 42.87% of votes.

Types of Frontend Web Apps that can be Built with React

Using React.js, you can build many types and scales of applications, such as:

• Single Page Applications (SPAs)
• Media sites
• Video streaming platforms
• SaaS solutions
• Content Management Systems (CMS)
• Progressive Web Apps (PWA)
• Interactive Dashboards
• E-commerce Websites
• Educational Apps
• Travel Booking Apps
• Desktop Apps
• Mobile Apps

Top Brands That Have Used React.js for Their App Development

Many well-known web and mobile apps are built with React.js. Here are a few notable examples:

Facebook: As the largest social media platform and the developer of React.js, Facebook has integrated over 20,000 React.js components into its web app, particularly for the Facebook Ads Manager.

Walmart: The leading American retail supermarket uses React.js to maintain platform consistency, implement advanced web features, facilitate unit code testability, and enhance the user experience.

Netflix: The popular video streaming service employs React.js within its microservice-based architecture to optimize startup speed, improve runtime performance, and deliver a seamless user experience.

Airbnb: With a team of 60 software engineers, Airbnb, an American vacation rental company, used React.js to create a sophisticated cross-platform app that ensures consistent performance across all operating systems.

Twitter: Following the lead of platforms like Facebook and Instagram, Twitter uses React.js to enhance its web app UI, especially in the Tweet compose box and timeline/feed feature, providing a dynamic user experience.

Other brands such as Grammarly, BBC News, Pinterest, Myntra, Uber, and Lyft have also utilized React.js in their web app development to enhance the user experience.

Benefits of React

Here are some advantages of using React.js for your next web app development project:

Simple UI Library: React is relatively simple compared to other front-end frameworks or libraries, featuring a well-defined lifecycle and a component-based approach. It uses a unique syntax called JSX, allowing the use of both JavaScript and HTML.

Dynamic Web App Development: React.js uses JSX (JavaScript extension) that supports HTML quotes and syntax, facilitating the rendering of code subcomponents. React efficiently handles HTML strings and supports machine-readable codes for building dynamic web apps.

Reusable Components: React.js is composed of multiple components, each with its own logic and controls, responsible for executing small, reusable HTML code lines. These components can be reused wherever needed, making it easier to develop and maintain your web app. Nested components can be created for building complex apps.

Optimized Web App Performance: React.js leverages the virtual DOM, which deals with HTML, XML, or XHTML, enhancing your web app’s performance. The virtual DOM resides in memory and directly updates code in it, resulting in highly performant apps.

Large Community: As an open-source JavaScript library, React has a large global community of over 14.7 million developers who actively work to improve ReactJS and support others facing problems.

SEO-friendly: ReactJS has successfully challenged the notion that JavaScript frameworks are not SEO-friendly. React can work on the server side, and the Virtual DOM is rendered on the browser as a regular web page with the support of the Next.js script.

Limitations of React

Here are a few limitations or cons of React.js:

It’s a Library, not a Framework: Although React is a JavaScript library that competes with other frontend JavaScript-based frameworks, it has some limitations. Its pre-written code structure may seem advantageous, but its flexible nature can reduce code uniformity, making it challenging for developers unfamiliar with the project.

Tricky Syntaxes: ReactJS uses JSX, which requires writing code by combining HTML and JavaScript in components. While beneficial in some ways, it can be considered a limitation, especially for beginners.

Continuous Updates: React frequently gets updates, requiring developers to stay familiar with all new developments and deprecations. This necessitates active participation in the evolution of React.js.

View Part: As a UI library, React.js focuses only on the app’s UI layers. Other technologies are needed to build a full-stack web app.

Now that you know a lot about React.js, let’s take a closer look at Vue.js!

What is Vue?

Vue.js is an open-source, progressive, MVVM-based, approachable, highly performant, and versatile frontend JavaScript framework extensively used for building user interfaces and single-page applications (SPAs). Its simplicity and flexibility make Vue.js a favorite among developers when comparing Vue vs. React popularity. The adaptable nature of Vue.js makes it ideal for updating existing web app projects or building entirely new web apps from scratch. Additionally, its decoupling nature, highly customizable modules, and visual components enable developers to extend web app functionalities as needed.

Vue.js Statistics

• On Reddit, Vue.js has a community of 99k members and ranks in the top 5% of communities by size.
• According to BuiltWith, there are over 1,689,786 live websites currently using Vue. Additionally, Vue.js ranks as the 4th most popular in the Top 10k sites within the JavaScript Library category.
• As per the StackOverflow survey, Vue.js is preferred by around 18.82% of developers worldwide.

Types of Frontend Web Apps Built with Vue.js

• Single-page applications (SPAs)
• Progressive web apps
• E-commerce sites
• 2D board games like chess.com
• Online repositories
• Online ticket booking/reservation platforms
• Social media platforms
• Content management systems (CMS)
• Real-time web apps
• Hybrid mobile apps

Top Brands Using Vue.js for App Development

Let’s look at how some top brands have utilized Vue.js to enhance their web apps:

• Adobe Portfolio: This custom website builder allows designers to create their creative portfolios to showcase their artwork. Adobe Portfolio used Vue.js to optimize the front end and seamlessly migrate existing code, significantly improving user experience.
• Trivago: The globally popular trip-planning site uses Vue.js and Nuxt.js to revamp its subsite, Trivago Magazine, into a single-page application to improve SEO traffic.
• Behance: Part of the Adobe family, this designer’s social network used Vue.js to migrate its homegrown solutions to a community-supported solution, resulting in robust website performance and cost-effectiveness.
• GitLab: An open-source tool for developers to manage the software development lifecycle faced issues with managing complex features and scaling its Rails + jQuery-powered app. Vue.js facilitated source code migration, eliminating the need to rewrite and refactor code and easing the process of adding new features.
• Upwork: Initially using AngularJS for front-end development, Upwork realized the benefits of integrating Vue.js and began using it even in smaller parts of their app.

These are just a few examples, but many top brands have used Vue.js in their mission-critical web app development, such as Facebook (in its News Feed), Netflix (in its streaming interface), and Alibaba (to deliver a better customer experience).

Benefits of Vue

Here are some of the advantages of using Vue.js for your next web app development project:

Simplicity: Vue.js features a single-file component-based architecture that includes HTML, CSS, and JS codes. This design allows developers to independently test specific parts of the app code, understand the code flow, optimize the app, and identify errors easily.

Lightweight: The Vue.js framework is only about 20 kb in size, making it quick to download and install without taking up much space.

A Range of Support Tools: Despite its small file size, Vue.js is equipped with a robust array of tools. Notably, the globally installed npm package, Vue CLI, enables quick scaffolding of new projects using Vue Create.

Adoptable: Vue adds additional markup to HTML code, unlike other front-end technologies that require writing the code from scratch.

Integrates with other Frameworks: If you are using a micro frontend architecture in your web app development with technologies like Angular and React, Vue.js can seamlessly integrate with them. This allows for easy customization of your app UI based on project requirements.

Limitations of Vue.js

Here are a few limitations or cons of Vue.js:

Frequent Updates: Vue.js updates more frequently than other front-end technologies, which can be challenging for beginners as it requires continuous learning and exploration.

Lost in Translation: Since Vue.js was developed in China, much of its documentation is in Chinese. This can create a language barrier for developers who do not speak the language.

Less Expertise: As Vue.js is still evolving, there are fewer contributors and fewer experienced Vue.js developers available for hire.

Limited Plug-ins: Compared to other frameworks, Vue.js has fewer plug-ins. This can be a drawback for developers accustomed to having extensive support tools.

Mobile Support Issues: Apps built with Vue often face compatibility issues with outdated versions of mobile browsers, which ideally should not occur.

React vs Vue: Key Similarities

Before discussing the differences between React and Vue, let’s first explore their similarities:

JavaScript At Core: Both React.js and Vue.js are built on JavaScript and support the creation of robust, dynamic web applications.

Build Dynamic User Interfaces: Both technologies support virtual DOM and facilitate a declarative approach to building UI components, making them ideal for creating highly interactive and dynamic user interfaces.

Open-source Community: React and Vue are open-source projects, free to use, with dedicated developer communities working on enhancing their performance and ecosystem by building third-party plugins, APIs, and libraries.

PWA Support: Both React and Vue can be used to build Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) that offer a native-like experience to users, including push notifications and home screen usability with full responsiveness.

In React, PWAs can be built using the Service Worker API and Web App Manifest. Vue supports PWA development through its Vue CLI, which includes the PWA plugin packed with necessary files and configurations. Thus, both React and Vue are excellent choices for developing modern, responsive, and engaging web apps.

Rapid Development

Both React and Vue, with their component-based architecture, are ideal choices for rapid app development projects, though they each have unique approaches to development.

When working with React, it’s essential to have a clear understanding when selecting the router system, managing exceptions, and dealing with code complexities across different software development lifecycles. Additionally, hiring React.js developers with extensive industry experience is crucial for handling various project complexities. This expertise contributes to faster app development using React.

Vue, on the other hand, offers swift assistance in building creative applications by integrating with third-party tools and web packs such as Vue dev-tools, Vue loader, StoryBook, Bit, and Single-File Components (SFCs). These tools accelerate the web app development process and promote rapid development.

As promised, these were the similarities between React JS and Vue JS. Now, it’s time to move on to the main topic we all were waiting for!

React vs Vue: Key Differences

To ease your journey in comparing two very popular front-end technologies, React and Vue, we have used specific parameters to reveal answers to all your queries.

Both popular JavaScript technologies have their pros and cons. However, there are areas where one outshines the other. So, let’s explore the differences between React and Vue:

App Architecture Support

What architecture does React.js follow?

React, being a UI library, only provides support for the view layer of the application built using its components. It supports a component-based architecture rather than having a robust built-in architecture. React components act like functions, helping in rendering user interface data changes and updating them using the virtual DOM. This ensures constant user interactions with the app components, effectively building a React.js architecture. These components, also known as the state of the React components, are used for building apps with a specific scope.

React follows the MVC architecture:

• Model managed by libraries such as Redux and MobX
• View to manage the UI part
• Controller represented by the container components

However, to build real-world enterprise-grade apps using React, external libraries like Redux, Flux, Reflux, and others focusing on its architectural pattern are necessary.

What architecture does Vue.js support?

Vue.js supports the Model View ViewModel (MVVM) architecture for building large-scale applications. The View and Model parts are connected to facilitate a two-way data-binding approach:

• Model represents the app’s data and business logic through JavaScript objects.
• View is the user interface where the actual DOM instance management takes place.
• ViewModel acts as a mediator between the model and the view layer of the code, where the developer interacts with the source code.

Vue’s architecture and DOM structure are divided into two parts: Filters and Directives.

Learning Curve

When asked, “Is React easy to learn? Is Vue.js easy to learn? or Which is easier: Vue or React?” experienced web developers would generally agree that both React and Vue offer a faster learning curve. However, certain parameters reveal significant differences:

• Component Structure: Both use component-based architecture. Vue has a simpler and more intuitive syntax, especially beneficial for beginners, compared to React.
• State Management: React relies on external libraries like Redux, while Vue has built-in state management capabilities, making it easier to manage states.
• Community and Documentation: React has a larger open-source community, more contributors, and comprehensive documentation with multilingual support. Vue also has a growing community and documented resources, but some aren’t translated for all developers globally.
• Tooling and Ecosystem: Both have extensive tools and plugins, but React has more support tools, libraries, and plugins compared to Vue.js.

In short, both have their pros and cons regarding the learning curve.

Complex App Development Support

When considering developing a mission-critical app, you might ask:

Is React good for complex projects?

Yes, if you want to build an SEO-friendly single-page application using React with server-side rendering and a great, responsive UI that is highly performant and scalable. React is indeed the best choice for building complex apps. React strengthens its build using server-side rendering model architectures like Redux, Flux, and SSR-specific frameworks like Next.js. In short, React.js is suitable for building complex, large-scale apps.

Is Vue good for large applications?

Developing large-scale, complex apps with Vue requires careful handling due to the need for interlinking different components, which can complicate standardization. However, Vue’s Vuex state management library simplifies the complex app development process by eliminating the need for writing spaghetti code. Using this library, you can effectively build complex apps with Vue.

User Experience

Vue.js and ReactJS are both well-known for providing excellent user experiences due to their support for virtual DOM and data binding. You might wonder, “Is VueJS better than ReactJS?” While both frameworks excel in creating seamless and efficient user interfaces, React is often the preferred choice for businesses. React enables the creation of clean and rich user interfaces with UI components, such as buttons and text boxes, which users find highly interactive. When implemented correctly, React ensures a bug-free and high-performance user experience.

However, Vue.js is favored by many front-end developers for its flexibility in experimenting with UI elements. Vue allows for more experimentation without directly reflecting code changes in the UI. Additionally, Vue’s two-way data binding simplifies the process of configuring and modifying HTML attributes and values without affecting other parts of the code, known as v-bind.

App Size

Regarding app size, both ReactJS and VueJS are lightweight and feature a component-based architecture that enhances app performance. Vue is generally lighter than React and quicker in data rendering. Although React.js applications tend to be larger, recent updates have reduced the app package size by 30%.

Vue.js maintains its reputation as a lightweight framework, with apps typically ranging from 50kb to 100kb. Initial loading times for these apps can be slow, but lazy loading can break down the code into smaller segments for quicker loading. Furthermore, Vue’s robust support tech stacks, such as Nuxt.js, Vuex, Bit, and Vue-router, facilitate state management and reduce the need to write code from scratch, thereby saving time, reducing code lines, and minimizing app size.

App Performance

When comparing React and Vue performance, both frameworks excel, but their effectiveness depends on the type of app and the development approach used.

Are React apps fast? React.js is known for developing highly performant web apps, standing out among other front-end libraries and frameworks. Its lightweight UI library minimizes DOM manipulation and reduces code clutter by allowing component reuse. This leads to robust single-page apps with efficient performance and excellent user experience. Additionally, React’s DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle reduces redundancy, prevents mistakes, and enhances developer productivity.

In terms of Performance: Can Vue Beat React?

Vue.js competes strongly in developing performant apps with its virtual DOM. While Vue-based apps might slightly lag in performance compared to React apps, the lazy loading feature in Vue can break down app code to enhance loading times. Additionally, selecting the right app architecture can contribute to better performance.

App Scalability

Both React and Vue are suitable for building large-scale, enterprise-grade apps due to their support for component reusability. React’s traditional JavaScript-based structure may raise doubts about its scalability, but it is indeed reliable for enterprise-grade app development. Some developers may question Vue.js’s suitability for large-scale apps as it still has room for growth. However, its component-based architecture allows for breaking down code into smaller, manageable repositories. Vue also offers web packs and Mixin elements to extend code.

Flexibility

React excels in flexibility, allowing developers to install third-party components freely. Vue, on the other hand, provides a limited set of components for implementing app features. While Vue’s flexibility can lead to code management complexities and errors, these issues can be mitigated with sufficient resources and support from active communities. React’s extensively active open-source community and references give it an edge over Vue in terms of flexibility.

Code Maintainability

Both React and Vue feature component-based architecture, simplifying code maintenance. However, React.js has an advantage due to the extensive support from its open-source community and the experience of its developers. Vue.js, meanwhile, needs to address some community language issues and support limitations to improve its reliability.

Mobile App Development

Despite its small library, React can be used to build native-like cross-platform apps through React Native. Vue, in collaboration with NativeScripts, also supports cross-platform app development. However, for creating single codebase apps for Android and iOS, developers often prefer React Native or Flutter due to their competitive benefits. Vue is still maturing in this area and has some way to go before it can deliver robust apps on par with React.

Providing App Security

Both React and Vue have certain security limitations. React.js is prone to popular cyber attacks like server-side rendering attacks, SQL injections, and XSS vulnerabilities. Vue.js includes a built-in sanitizer, making its code vulnerable to XSS and more. Hiring experienced React.js developers who follow app security best practices can enhance app security. In Vue.js, you can secure the app by using external libraries or sanitizing the HTML part before committing the code. Vue also automatically injects necessary HTML, URL, and JS codes for security during rendering.

Test Support

React.js supports important test runners such as Jest and Mocha, easing QA engineers’ tasks in testing the app, identifying issues in real browser environments, and reducing app testing time and time-to-market. Vue is still evolving in this aspect but does support tools like Jest, Mocha, or Chai for app unit testing. It also offers the Vue Testing Library and Vue Test Utils for hot reloading, faster refactoring, and code debugging.

This comparison should have provided valuable insights, but when should you use these technologies?

React vs Vue: Summing Up

• React is a front-end JavaScript library, whereas Vue is a framework.
• Vue primarily uses HTML templates, while React uses JSX alongside HTML as its code base.
• React offers component-based architecture for component state and DOM management, while Vue comes with a pool of tools and supporting libraries.
• In terms of learning, Vue has an easier learning curve compared to React.
• React is best suited for projects with multiple interdependent state changes, need to boost website performance, manage a complex codebase, require a front-end UI with high user interaction, and build large-scale apps with a faster time-to-market.
• Vue is often the best choice for building flexible, scalable web apps, small-scale app development projects, MVP development, quickly migrating existing app codebases, integrating with important apps like SPAs and MPAs rendered by the server, and when there’s a need for animation and interaction.

How Can Appinventors Help You in Frontend Development?

When deciding between React and Vue in 2023, it’s challenging to find a definitive answer as both are robust contenders. This guide should provide a clear picture to help you choose the suitable front-end technology for your business web app development.

However, if you have any doubts, you can always reach out to the web experts at Appinventors. They have a proven record of delivering intriguing solutions and can become your trusted IT companion, providing dedicated web services from design to development.

Share your requirements today and convert your investment into better returns for a bright business future.