In a world driven by technology, everything is under the strong influence of digitalization. Being in the digital era has added a high level of convenience for many, but for businesses, things have gotten very competitive. From retailers to service providers, every business is transitioning into a digital landscape, leading to saturation of the online world. Today, having a digital presence, such as a powerful website, is not enough, and companies are going towards web applications. Having a web app has become a necessity for businesses. To acquire a competitive edge, they need to build an online presence that is better than all others.
When it comes to building strong, impressive, and intuitive web applications, there is one thing that many front-end developers struggle with – choosing the right developer framework. Javascript libraries are springing up from every corner of the world, each one offering a unique set of features. Amidst the sea of these frameworks, there are two that are gaining momentum in the new decade – Vue and React.
The debate over vue vs. react is real, with developers arguing which one is the best. Without a thorough analysis, it is difficult to come to a conclusion and choose one that deserves to wear the crown in the year 2021. These are the two most popular frameworks that are helping developers create the most intuitive web apps. Each one offers amazing features that confuse these professionals, forcing them into a state of analysis paralysis.
In the end, it comes down to your needs and requirements. While both react and vue offer a dynamic set of specifications, you need to choose the one that aligns with your needs.
A Thorough Comparison – What is the Difference Between Vue and React?
Before we get into the differences between these platforms, we need to know exactly what they are and what they offer. Vue and React are both front-end JavaScript frameworks. These are the ones that every developer is choosing at present, making them super popular in the developer world. The component-based UI-development, the view library focus, Virtual DOM, and their component library for mobile app development are the top reasons why these two frameworks are so prominent in the developer landscape.
Starting from the background, the purpose of creating React was to target the needs of the social media giant, Facebook. This framework operates as an open-source under the MIT license. It is a stable platform, given that such a prominent industry player backs it.
The creator of Vue is Evan You. He is a former Google employee who aimed to improve the already existing JAVA tools. The professional front-end developer wanted to combine the best of all tools. That is why Vue includes the best features of Angular, Ember, and even React. With the integrated features of the industry’s best, Evan created a framework that made web app writing fast and easy – a pleasing experience for every developer.
React Vs. Vue: UI Components
Whether we talk about React or Vue, components are an integral part of both frameworks. User Interface or UI components are ones that get input, and the output aligns with it. These components make it easy for developers to reuse the code. When talking about Vue, this framework is much more intuitive than React. Why? UI and behavior are both part of components which contribute to the framework’s intuitiveness. The options of customization in Vue are high. Using this interface, you can easily, within a script, combine both the UI and behavior. Besides CSS, you can use multiple other pre-processors for Vue. In addition to this, Vue works well when integrated with other libraries.
Moving on to react. The same code for the creation of the UI element is responsible for dictating the behavior. The most iconic out of its components is the React Material-UI. It is amazing as it implements the Material Design of Google, making this framework very popular among the developers.
React Vs. Vue: Code Reusability
As discussed earlier, the component-based UI development is one of the best features of both Vue and React. It is what facilitates code reuse in both these frameworks. The useEffect hook of React allows the creation of custom hooks. How it benefits the developers? This feature lets a developer create reusable functions. When using React, it is much easier to reuse the state and lifecycle management code in an app.
In Vue, you might have to use mixins to make a code reusable. As a developer, you might know that mixins are a class of object-oriented programming languages. It is a source of methods through which the implementation of a particular behavior can take place.
To define a mixin, you need to write a simple code that consists of an object and its properties. Once you have defined a mixin, you need to assign it to an object with the structure. The structure needs to be the same as the Vue instance. This way, when you create a Vue instance, the code is re-implemented.
React Vs. Vue: Cost to Develop App
When using Vue to develop a website application, you need to keep a minimum of $10,000 aside. This is a case when you already have a database created. It is just the minimum amount, combining testing, deployment, hosting, as well as maintenance. The cost may even touch the $20,000 mark. It will cost you $30 per hour in an ideal situation, with the building of one page every four hours. The cost of developing an app might exceed $20,000 in some cases. These numbers are subject to change as web app development costs vary with a lot of factors. Mainly, it depends upon the complexity of the app. The more add-ons you include, the higher is the cost of developing a web app using react or vue.
React Vs. Vue: Reach (Cross-platform) of the App
When it comes to building a cross-platform app, we can say that React is the king. Why? This framework allows you to reuse almost all JS codes. While creating native widgets that have the capability of controlling their styles, this framework lets you handle the view layer, that too purely as a state output. This helps in the creation of companion apps.
In terms of building cross-platform, Vue is not as useful as React, but it can work with other cross-platform UI frameworks such as Weex or Electron. With these partners, Vue works exactly like React.
React Vs. Vue: Community and Popularity
Another factor of difference between Vue and React is their library’s popularity. It is an important factor as it impacts the third-party library quality. Not only this, but the factor of popularity also determines the readiness of the availability of developers for hire. For developers, this means that the solution to their development problem might be readily available if they search for it.
React has 152k GitHub stars, 13.5k commits, 1480 contributors, 231k questions on StackOverflow, and 1067k live websites compared to 168k GitHub stars, 3.1k commits, 371 contributors, 78k questions on StackOverflow, and 851 live websites for Vue. While comparing these numbers, we see that React is a clear winner. It means that you will easily find tutorials, helpful articles, and online courses to React. The vast ecosystem of packages, extensions, and, most importantly, third-party libraries help developers find the answers to their questions to create web applications using React efficiently.
Even though React’s market share is much broader compared to Vue, its community is much more fragmented. Vue has fewer resources in comparison to React. Like React, even Vue has support from all major IDEs, but the support is not as extensive as that of React.
React Vs. Vue: Development Framework and Developer Tools
The development framework size is also a crucial aspect that helps determine the usefulness of a web app development framework. When using vue or react, you will not be much bothered as React is 100Kb and Vue is around 80Kb. Both frameworks are of small size, and it is the ideal situation. The small the size of a framework, the better it is for a developer. The development of small applications is convenient on both these frameworks.
Coming to developer tools. The top tools for developers in this framework include Vue CLI, Nuxt JS, Bit for Vue, Vue-router, Vuex, Axios, Vuetify, Vue Apollo, and Mocha. These tools make it much easier for developers to build efficient apps. Just like Vue, you will find loads of developer tools for React as well. React Dev Tools for Chrome, React Sight, Bit, Extension Pack, Storybook, Styleguidest, Create React App, Bootstrap, and React-proto are some of the most efficient tools available that make creating a web app using React easy and convenient.
React Vs. Vue: Productivity
Even though React is a super-efficient web app development framework when it comes to vue vs. react productivity, Vue is a better option. It offers a developer flexibility that allows them to create applications just as they wish. Vue is simple and scalable, which makes it a better choice in terms of productivity.
React Vs. Vue: Performance
When analyzing React Vs. Vue performance, we can say that the apps created by either of them perform well. The reason being the tiny bundle sizes of the libraries of both frameworks. The small size helps in reducing the initial load speed. The startup time is one of the most critical factors to evaluate the performance of frameworks. Both React and Vue do well in this case.
Another factor that helps in evaluating the performance of apps built using React or Vue is runtime. To check this aspect of performance, you need to compare memory allocation and the duration of operations. In memory allocation, there is no match for Vue, and when it comes to runtime, there is no better framework than React.
Besides these factors, both frameworks have server-side rendering (SSR), tree-shaking, and bundling. When using React, you need to know that if you modify a component state, it will affect its child components. It will re-render all of them. This is where Vue takes the lead. Unlike React, this framework prevents re-rendering of child components with its track dependency capability.
React Vs. Vue: User Interface
When using React to build web applications, you must know that you can create self-contained UI components with view-rendering instructions. It lets developers create complex user interfaces using components, small and isolated pieces of code. The UIs created using React are intuitive, declarative, and SEO-friendly. The designs offered by this framework are UI-focused.
Final Thoughts
The debate over Vue Vs. React has been going on for a long time. Due to React’s popularity, many people believe that it is the best framework out there. It puts Vue’s power in the dark, convincing people that Vue is not the right option to choose. Now, for the factual statistics, for three years straight. React is an older platform and is very powerful in terms of many features, which is why the majority of developers use this framework for their projects. Airbnb, Netflix, PayPal, Disqus, and the New York Times are some of the big names that have used to React for their web application.
On the other hand, several high-end brands have chosen Vue for their web apps. Some of these names include Euronews, Behance, Alibaba, Trustpilot, and Vice.
In the end, it does come down to your needs and requirements. It is smart to choose a framework that works for you and do not base your decision on its popularity, number of features, or the cost to develop an app.
Is Vue faster than react?
Both Vue and React are powerful when it comes to performance. In memory allocation and startup time, Vue is more efficient than React. In terms of runtime, React is more powerful than Vue.
Will Vue replace react?
In comparison to React, Vue is a new framework for web app development. This framework has a considerable distance to cover to reach the level of React. Even though Vue is better than React in several aspects, it still won’t take over the platform as of yet.
Can I use react and VUE together?
Yes, you can use Vue and React together. Developers can build a small feature of a React app built with Vue.
Does Google Use react?
No, Google does not use react. It uses its own AngularJS development framework.