The area of web development is changing rapidly along with the technology used in it. With the usage of JavaScript rising rapidly, many JavaScript frameworks and libraries are evolved. This article aims to compare 3 most popular JavaScript frameworks i.e., Angular, React & Vue.js among various parameters including performance, popularity and learning curve to help us understand and make an educated decision on which framework to use for different situations. Lets dive in straight into Angular vs React vs Vue.
Table of Contents
Introduction
JavaScript was introduced in 1996 as a client-side programming language to bring the dynamicity on the HTML pages. JavaScript whose previous name was LiveScript was created by Brendan Eich to solve the three major requirements that were dynamic, easy to grasp syntax and powerful. But it has now evolved and come a very far as one of the most popular programming languages currently. Also, as per W3Tech web technology survey, 98% websites in 2022 uses JavaScript. The JS developer community is also at its top with GitHub stating JS ranks first in the amount of pull and push requests.
In the front end ecosystem there are several of framework available presently and developers need a clear idea on which to choose for their project. All these framework come with different pros and cons and thus all of these framework have different use cases. Considering this lets compare top three JavaScript framework i.e Angular vs React vs Vue and and find out which is best for different use cases.
Angular
Angular is the successor of the popular AngularJS framework, and is developed by same team who developed Angular JS. It was released initially September 2016. Backward compatibility is maintained all the way back to Angular version 2, although it is not mentioned with Angular version 1. Angular 1 has been rebranded as Angular JS, whereas Angular 2 and above versions are simply referred to as Angular.
It was designed to run quickly over the internet and gives users the option to exercise control over scalability while simultaneously satisfying requirements for large amounts of data. Angular uses templates for representing the view. Angular templates use extended HTML styled syntax, e.g. component’s properties can be accessed in the template. The template can be extended in Angular with special syntax that can add some special feature which are Interpolation, Property binding, event binding and directives.
It is maintained by Google and has millions of clients all over the world. The architecture of the platform is such that it facilitates the ability for multiple developers to work easily together on the same project at the same time. Angular is a more full framework than other similar options, and it comes with predefined configurations for things like community connectivity, router, language choice, and device-chain building.
React
React is a JavaScript library, for building declarative views and user interfaces. As mentioned earlier, term “library” is a collection of functionalities the helps a developers fasten the development process. Jordan Walke, a software developer at Facebook, was a major contributor to the development of React in 2011. In 2013, it became open source, and ever since then, new features and improvements have been added to it. Facebook along with a team of individuals are responsible for developing and maintaining React. Facebook and Instagram, are both using React in their own projects.
React is declarative meaning different views are created and updated for each state. The development of interactive user interfaces can be made more aesthetically pleasing with the help of React, which makes it simpler to refresh the view whenever the underlying data is modified. This is achieved by subdividing the view into smaller components, which may then be pieced together to form more complicated user interfaces. Instead of using templates, components are built in JavaScript, which enables a smooth flow of data.
React dosen’t use the traditional HTML templates and instead introduces to the JSX for creating templates. JSX as discussed above uses JavaScript to create HTML like syntax. Thus entire React uses only JavaScript. Apart from this react introduces to the concept of virtual DOM which is placed before the real DOM and thus whenever the changes are made are the virtual DOM only modifies the nodes that needs to be changed which makes the app more faster.
Vue
Vue is a JavaScript library that is comparatively small in size and was developed by Evan You. It is the newest framework among Angular and React. Evan had been working previously for Google and Meteor prior to the growth of Vue. Evan believed that using Angular in some use cases became too heavy when he was working for Google. As a result, he made the decision to remove the aspects of Angular that he likes in order to create a light-weight framework. As a result of him sharing his work with other people on GitHub in 2014, Vue.Js was able to have its start.
Evan began working with Vue while he was working with Angular. Nonetheless, he views Vue to be most similar to the React framework because the fundamental concepts of data binding and components are shared by both frameworks. Vue places a stronger emphasis on the user experience than React does, which makes it simple to learn for anyone who is familiar with the fundamentals of web development, including HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
Evan has amassed a limited number of individual and corporate sponsors after launching a crowdfunding campaign on Patreon in 2015. The campaign began in 2015. Because of the income that this brings in, he is able to focus all of his efforts on Vue JS at the moment.
Vue uses the best features from both Angular and React JS frameworks and offers it in a lightweight package. It uses templating like Angular whereas implements concept of virtual DOM like react. As per the users, Vue is easy to learn, easily approachable, versatile and high performant. This makes Vue a progressive framework.
Comparison on basis of Performance
Size of framework
The frameworks’ minified size is displayed in the table below. The size of each framework’s minified package gives an idea of the scope of each framework.
Angular’s everything in-the-box approach has a hefty price tag when it comes to library size, with the gzipped file coming in at 143kB. Compare this to 44kB for React and 34kB for Vue. The main reason of this is due to the fact that Angular ships with lots of tools build in thus comes with larger codebase as it’s built for larger and more complex applications.
One must also note that, react comes in middle of both of these frameworks and Vue turns out to be the lightest framework in terms of size.
| Frameworks | Version | Size of Framework (Minified) |
| Angular | 15.0.3 | ~ 143kB |
| React | 18.2.0 | ~ 44.5kB |
| Vue | 3.2.45 | ~ 34.0kB |
DOM Benchmarks
While comparing Angular vs React vs Vue performance is very important parameter and DOM benchmarks can help us directly compare the performance. We use the data provided by Stefan Krause’s website who provides the DOM benchmarks for various JavaScript frameworks. These data is displayed below.
While performance benchmarks can be gamed and tampered, hence it shouldn’t drive your decision considering it to be the ultimate parameter for performance. But, they can be useful when comparing the relative speed of one framework to the next. The data from the previous section clearly shows how much time each of these frameworks to perform same DOM tasks.
While the deviation between all three libraries is not significant, it’s clear that Angular is the slowest performing of the three, with React slightly faster and Vue the fastest.
Comparison on basis of Learning Curve
Language Used
Below data summarizes the language used for each of the framework.
Angular uses TypeScript, it’s the most difficult framework to learn because apart from underrated and learning new framework developer also has to learn TypeScript and its syntax. In terms of learning React and Vue are a bit similar. Although similar, for one to use react, they must understand the Reacts JSX and CSS in JavaScript syntax even for basic HTML attributes to be used. Apart from that many functionalities of React uses the latest ES6 convention and thus user must be aware and underrated ES6 concepts to gain the most out of this framework. Vue is easiest to learn because syntax it uses looks like traditional HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Your choice here will also depend on the skills of your team and project. If your project team consists largely of C# and/or Java developers who are dubious of JavaScript, Angular is the clear winner as TypeScript’s syntax and workings are similar to that of Java/ C# . If, on the other hand, your team is made of traditional web developers who have built web apps before, Vue will feel the most familiar. Finally, if your team prefers the cutting edge of JavaScript and standards for your project, React would serve as a good fit.
Architecture
All three frameworks have quite similar architecture. In all this frameworks the application can be visualized as the tree of components with one component as the root component or the top component. This top components are generally the starting point of creation of the application. There can be unlimited hierarchy of child components.
Angular here is slightly different in terms of architecture. Apart from all the things similar to above lines one thing this differentiates Angular is the division of components into modules. Modules includes supporting code files related to components.
React and Vue are quite similar and do not have any specific rules that has to be followed. The building blocks both of these provides are quite similar. Unlike Angular, React and Vue although are inspired and may MVC / MVVM pattern there is not concrete implementation of it necessary.
One must not that React has types of components, functional and class components and thus, it may be slightly confusing for some new developers to understand the pros and cons of them and begin using React. Also many old libraries and packages are implemented using class components while currently functional components are mostly preferred especially after
introduction of hooks.
Vue might have the simplest architecture because its components is structured in such a way that all the HTML, CSS and JavaScript code specific to that component is present all in one single component file.
Considering the above points it is safe to say that although, React and Vue are equally challenging to understand but Vue might have a marginally easier learning curve in terms of architecture. React stand in between Vue and Angular and Angular, due as discussed above is little more complicated.
Data Management
In all of our frameworks one thing that is common is that data flows downwards from parent to child components. Data passed to child components can be accessed via props. Apart from this Angular and Vue both supports two-way data binding. Here data updated in model is synchronized and updated on the view and if data is changed in view layer (component) it is directly updated on model. Also, data from child components can be accessed in parent components. Hence, data coming down from component tree can be received, modified, and can be passed back from a child component. This adds more dynamicity toe the development process. Angular and Vue both supports Interpolation, Property Binding, and Event Binding.
React on the other hand only supports one-way data binding and thus the flow of data is unidirectional in nature. Here data can only be passed from parent to child components and not vice versa. Although this is much easier for understanding thr follow of data, it adds complexity to the development process for keeping the view synchronized with model and passing the data.
Third Party Libraries
All of our frameworks equally support the use of third-party packages. They all take advantage of Node Package Manager and its repository to install packages. Thus, the ease of using a third-party package in all of these frameworks is easy.
One point that can be observed is that it is more useful in React and Vue to use third party packages to add some vital functionality compared to Angular. The main reason of this is Angular has many of this vital functionality like two way data binding, router, data storage outside the component and more.
In terms of learning curve with respect to third-party packages we may assume that although all these frameworks will have marginal difference, Angular will require less amount of third party packages and React and Vue shall require more. This can be clearly seen from the table in the previous chapter, React has the most number of packages, Vue stands in middle and
Angular with the least number of packages. Thus, we may assume that React’s learning curve shall be the simplest while Vue and Angular will stand equal. This is because considering gap in number of packages between React and Vue and Angular’s everything out of box approach, we may safely say they both will ranked equally.
Comparison on basis of Popularity
Community Support
To figure out the community supports for each of these frameworks, data from GitHub and StackOverflow were analysed. GitHub data gives us the direct information on what frameworks most developers are working on including various other statistics like forks, issues and more for each framework.
One most note that this data may be slightly biased as older frameworks, due to time fact will have more followers and hence the number of developers working on it. Keeping it in mind, as per the table, we can clearly see that Vue has a bit more stars than React with Vue having over 200 thousand stars and React with about 199 thousand stars. Although the difference between them is not so big but difference between both these frameworks and Angular is huge.
Angular only has about 85 thousand stars. This is more than half less of both of these frameworks. React is the most forked framework among these three, with 43 thousand forks, Vue with, 33 thousand forks and Angular with 22 thousand forks. In terms of issues Angular has the highest number of issues which is about 24 thousand issues where as React and Vue only has about 11 thousand and 9 thousand issues respectively. The main reason for this high number of issues in Angular may be due to the fact that it is the oldest framework among others.
Considering all the factors we it may be safe to say that Angular is the least popular framework. Vue is presently the most liked framework but React is the most used framework
by developer right now.
Job Market Popularity
As seen from the data gathered by multiple job portals, we can clearly see that React has huge mount of scope in the market among Angular and Vue. Not only for full time jobs, React has more scope when we consider freelance portals too. Angular comes second in terms of scope and Vue has relatively the least am out of job openings in the market. This shall be a major point to consider especially for a new developer who is looking to learn any of these frameworks for entering the job market.
Conclusion
Considering all the above points , one thing that we can clearly understand is that there is no one particular winner among Angular vs React vs Vue. All this frameworks are build and works slightly differently. But we can surely make some assumptions.
To learn more about top frontend technologies of 2023, Read 10 Best Frontend Technologies for 2023
Vue is a lightweight framework with good performance compared to others. Vue even has the easiest learning curve. For a new developer go get started with frontend development and for those who are looking for a lightweight framework with good performance Vue is the clear winner. The disadvantage of Vue is that it has the least number of jobs available.
React is the most popular framework with having one of the best community supports around it. Even in terms of Job Market React is the clear winner and for those who are looking to make a good career or get a good job scope, React is an excellent choice.
Angular has steepest learning curve hence it’s hard to get started with Angular, but it gives lots of features in box which shall be very helpful for complex and large scale applications. It has good scope in Job market after React.
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