You Should Choose Vite Over CRA for React Apps, Here’s Why

For many beginners, intermediate and even for some expert programmers, Create React App is the key tool to start and maintain a React project because it provides many useful features such as HMR (Hot Module Replacement) and development server. However, it has a big drawback which is poor performance.

For almost two years, I used CRA for my React applications and I was happy because there were no configuration files and the build times were not a big deal for me because I was working on simple projects that contains 5,000 to 10,000 lines of code. However, when I tried to build something massive, like 25,000 lines of code, I started to get tired of waiting because when I started my project, the development server was getting ready in almost 5 minutes, and whenever I made a change in my code, I had to wait for almost 5 to 10 seconds to see the effects. These times are pretty huge when you are working a real-life project. I knew that it was not about my computer but CRA. That’s when I searched for some alternatives for CRA and found Vite.

Under the hood, CRA uses Webpack which is a popular asset bundler that helps us develop and build a web app. The Webpack was fine until 2–3 years ago but today, we have almighty Esbuild.