Getting Your Company To Switch To Vue

If you’ve fallen in love with Vue.js, you’ll be dreaming that your company will add it to their technology stack so you get to work with it every day.

For that to happen, though, you may need to convince certain decision makers in your company to give it a try, be it the CTO or some other stakeholder.

In this post, I’ll arm you with some compelling arguments that you can use to make the case for Vue.

Note: this article was originally posted here on the Vue.js Developers blog on 2018/10/30

Vue’s key selling points

First, you’ll need to present Vue’s main strengths. I’ve worded these in such a way that even non-technical stakeholders will understand.

Vue is easy to learn

Vue is famous for its intuitive design and shallow learning curve. This means it’s easy to train staff in, even non-frontend devs and designers.

Since developers will be up-and-running with Vue quickly, training costs will be kept to a minimum.

Vue is delightful to work with

Vue now has the most GitHub stars of any JavaScript UI library. This means developers like to work with it.

Happy developers are productive developers who don’t quit!

Vue is versatile

Vue provides a powerful solution for complex single-page applications but also scales down nicely for smaller projects where only basic page functionality needs to be added.

This means Vue can be used for a variety of company projects and therefore provides a good return on investment.

Vue is incrementally adoptable

Vue has been designed so that allow teams can systematically convert small pieces of an application over to Vue rather than doing a complete rebuild.

This means there is a low risk in trying it compared to other frameworks where a “no turning back” approach might be the only option.

Vue provides a leadership opportunity

Vue may or may not become the dominant JavaScript UI framework over the coming years.

Either way, companies who adopt it now will show their staff and their industry that they’re a smart company who invests in promising technology, just like Alibaba, Adobe, GitLab and others have done.

Common misconceptions about Vue

After you’ve presented Vue’s key strengths, decision makers may come back to you with some objections.

Vue is not a magic bullet, of course, and there may be a legitimate reason for why it is not suitable for your company. But often these objections are often just being recited from a click-bait article or an overconfident Reddit pundit.

Since a technology should be assessed on its real pros and cons, here are the corrections to common misconceptions about Vue.

Vue is hard to learn because it provides too much choice

It’s true that Vue provides many ways of doing things. For example, there are at least 7 ways to declare a component template!

But this does not make Vue hard to learn. On the contrary, this freedom allows developers to learn Vue in a way that’s easy and familiar to them. Then once they’re comfortable, they can work with their team’s unified approach.

Vue is a one-man project

It’s true that Evan You was the sole founder of Vue and still largely drives its direction. But the Vue team now consists of around 10–15 expert developers from around the world.

In the “State of Vue” report from 2017, Evan said: “…saying that Vue is a one-man project is no longer accurate and would be disrespectful to all the amazing contributions from the team and the community.”

Vue lacks corporate backing

It’s true that Vue gets its funding only through sponsorship and donation. But Vue and its community have grown incredibly quickly, proving it doesn’t need to be propped up by corporate money.

It’s a good thing that the Vue team is able to prioritize users and is not beholden to the whims of Google, Facebook or Microsoft.

Vue can’t be used as a native mobile solution

You can create native mobile apps with Vue by using frameworks like NativeScript-Vue or Weex. While not as mature as React Native, these frameworks are already being used in production apps.

In the up-coming Vue.js 3, Vue’s renderer will be decoupled from the main library, allowing consuming frameworks like these to improve even more.

Essential Vue resources

Now that you’ve made your case for you Vue by presenting its strengths and dismissed any misconceptions, the decision maker may be persuaded enough to do their own research into Vue.

Here are some resources I recommend you point them to:

The official Vue.js website

vuejs.org will allow a decision maker to see first-hand the thorough documentation, the numerous sponsors and donors, and the impressive Vue team.

Even better if you get them to use the Getting Started guide and see how is it is to create their own Hello World Vue app.

The State of Vue.js report

Compiled by web development and design agency Monterail, the State of Vue.js report shows real-world data on how companies use Vue and how it will evolve in the future.

The report is based on surveys given to companies using Vue, like Adobe, Behance, and GitLab, and is reliable information about the business case for Vue.

With that, you now have a solid case for Vue that should help your company make the best decision about adopting it.

Good luck!