What’s the Difference Between a Framework and Library?

Buy a house, or cautiously build your own.

What’s the difference between a framework and library? I’ve had this discussion with developers at work and meetups, and the core idea boils down to this.

You tell libraries what to do, frameworks tell you what to do.

Framework Upsides

Generally speaking a framework tells you what to do. It has a “right way” of doing things and provides tooling to support you.

Two perfect examples are Angular and Vue.

All the tools are here

These are frameworks created by dedicated teams, and ship with everything you need to build large-scale applications.

• Components
• Basic state management
• Directives
• Handling forms
• Routing
• HTTP
• Testing
• More (UI libraries, animations, etc.)