Vue.js vs ReactJS — which one is better for your business?
Vue.js and ReactJS are the most rapidly developing tools for front-end development, and we can clearly see it also in our projects at Asper Brothers. We can also see that a huge portion of strictly technological knowledge may be kind of intimidating if you’re a not-exactly-tech person, who just want to deliver a great digital product. That’s why we created this comparison — hope you’ll find all of the answers here!
The goal of this article is to compare Vue.js and ReactJS in various aspects: from popularity, through prices, to technical features. The tricky part is they don’t even belong to the same family — Vue.js is a framework and React — a library. But it doesn’t matter now — let’s dive into them in the deepest possible way!
Vue vs React — basic info
At first sight, both Vue and ReactJS have a lot more similarities than differences. The main initial common points you should be aware of are:
- Both are built to work with root libraries.
- React.js and Vue.js are based on the Virtual DOM model.
- Both tools have a component-based structure.
No matter if you decide between choosing Vue, React or any other development methods, you should always keep in mind that fresh technologies can bring some risks since their communities are not developed enough and there may be no answers for some questions yet. The most common risks related to fresh technologies are of course bugs and vulnerabilities.
Luckily, both Vue.js and React were released by a huge corporation and respected developers, so you can be quite confident of their stability and a huge community of devs that could support you in case you meet some difficulties on your way to developing a product.
Vue.js and React have a quite mature history when it comes to front-end technologies, they also have the dev’s support and are very popular among the tech community.
Here is the GitHub Stars comparison history:
Although the React community is way bigger than Vue.js’s, React’s fragmentary nature makes it more complicated, so naturally, it can be harder to get feedback on some questions. On the other side, developing in Vue.js is much easier and takes less time, but it’s even more complicated to find Vue devs and find a team for future product maintenance.
How popular are Vue i React?
2017
2018
Let’s also take a look at these technologies’ popularity in the Google Trends tool:
As you can see, React is much more popular in the developer community, which means there is a bigger amount of ready-made solutions. But it still doesn’t mean that it’s better than Vue!
The speed and cost of development
Our experience at Asper Brothers proves that Vue.js and React are very similar when it comes to development speed. There are many additional libraries, frameworks, and packages that support building applications rapidly. Of course, it all depends on the coding experience and skills of a dev team.
The cost of developing a product based on Vue or React depends on many factors — basically it’s all about developer’s experience and seniority level, plus his location. You want precise numbers? Here we go:
Technical features
🔧Tooling
React provides a CLI tool called create-react-app which supports devs in accelerating such aspects as app development, adding scripts and installing necessary dependencies. Before this tool was released, programmers were forced to copy the files from previous apps each time they started developing something new, or configure everything manually AGAIN (ouch!). Not very time-consuming, but for sure boring AF.
The create-react-app made React developers’ life better by providing a CLI interface for building apps with a basic structure, and features to install all the necessary dependencies, add scripts to the package.json to run, test, and finally — build the application.
On the other hand, Vue.js didn’t stay behind and brought to life a tool called Vue-CLI, which allows developers to create Vue projects quickly. The main advantages of Vue-CLI are the fact that plugins can be added anytime without blocking, providing plugins with no settings (which means developers can focus on development, not customization), improving the app without “outliers” and the opportunity for devs to create their own plugins and templates.
💢Flexibility
Cross-platform app development is widely popular and both frameworks are in a race to provide the winning cross-platform app development experience. React is a mature and popular platform for native-rendered apps, but Vue is still evolving and aims to provide a smooth development experience to create apps for iOS and Android.
When it comes to React, there is not much to offer in their official library, which — for some devs — does not give enough room to experiment. Of course, there are some tools that can be integrated with this technology (React routing, Redux or MobX — to name a few), but there’s a need of big programming experience to create dynamic apps with them.
Unlike in React’s case, the official site of the Vue technology provides more solutions for developers. In addition, server-side development is also supported by a Vue service side render. In this case, we have Vuex for state management and Vue Router for routing — these are the add-ons that can be used in custom software development services.
🎭Performance
The changes in the app are reflected in its user interface and a thing called DOM. There are two types of DOM — a virtual DOM and a real DOM. The type of DOM has great influence on the performance of any programming technology.
React has a virtual DOM which is lightweight and not browser-specific. It is a major reason behind the popularity of React as with virtual DOM, since it helps to eliminate the problem of inefficient performance.
When it comes to Vue, it also has a virtual DOM but at the same time provides a faster performance (comparing to React). It also guarantees a bug-free performance.
For everyone on a search for ReactJS and Vue.js performance info, we prepared this in the clearest way possible:
🔃Routing and state management
Both web development tools characterize with similar approaches in managing the components’ state but still, we can spot some differences in immutability and other aspects. Let’s dive into them. In component-based frameworks like React and Vue, devs have to pay attention to the state management and data flow when scaling up an application, because of a number of components interacting with each other and sharing data issues.
In this kind of scenario, React provides a solution called Redux architecture which basically stands for unidirectional data flow and is an alternative to the MVC architecture. But when it comes to Vue.js, there’s even more advanced architecture named Vuex, which integrates into Vue. Unlike Redux, Vuex changes the state instead of replacing it
📂Use cases
Let’s take a look at the companies that use Vue.js and React.js. In their digital products.
React:
- Netflix
Vue:
- GitLab
- 9Gag
- Euronews
- Behance
- Alibaba
- Vice
Summary
In which cases Vue is better than React?
- When you look for up-to-date documentation and simpler syntax
- When you need to create something light-weight, smaller, faster, and flexible
- When you seek rich HTML templates to provide ease in development
In which cases React is better than Vue?
- When there’s a requirement to build mobile apps
- For professional and great community support to solve any issue
- When there’s a need to build large-scale apps, such as an e-commerce platform or marketplace
- For light-weight and easy version migrating
To conclude, let’s sum up all the information to see which one will be a better choice for your digital business:
If you have any additional questions, feel free to hit us up HERE!
