React vs. Vue vs Angular: Which is Better?

When it comes to developing, choosing the right framework is essential to project success. Developers traditionally struggled between choosing Angular vs React for their projects.

However, over the last few years, Vue has entered the market. This has made developers’ decision a lot harder as there is now even more information to consider.

If you’re a developer starting on a project (whether it be your next business venture or a personal project) this guide should help you decide as to which framework you should be using. In today’s post, we’re going to cover various aspects of Angular vs Vue vs React and will investigate which one suits your business needs.

What is Angular?

Angular was developed by Google and first released in 2010. This makes it one of the oldest framework solutions of all. It is a component-based framework for building scalable web applications. Since its release is it has been maintained by a team of developers and has quickly become a corporate choice for building interactive applications. This is due to its vast functionality and high performance.

What is Vue?

Vue is also known as Vue.js and is a progressive open-source front-end JavaScript framework created in 2014. It is best known for its clean script and elegant designs. It is the youngest member of the group and was actually developed by ex-Google employee Evan You. It has seen a large shift in popularity over the last three years, although it isn’t backed by a large company like the others.

What is React?

React was developed by Facebook and released in 2013. Facebook uses react in all their products including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. React can be used as a UI library to render elements without enforcing a specific project structure, which is why it is not strictly viewed as a framework.

Here is a summary of each framework and its history:

Comparing React.js, Angular.js and Vue.js

Licenses

It is interesting to note that all three frameworks use the MIT license. This provides limited restrictions on reuse. An MIT license means that you can use it how you like so long as you include the original copyright and license notice in any copy of the software.

Popularity

According to Stack Overflow 2020 Developer Survey, Angular is one of the most used front-end frameworks. Vue ranks slightly lower coming in on seventh place in popularity. However, this could be due to Vue being newer to the market, and not having as much time to establish itself.

Community

The below chart looks at Angular vs React vs Vue with respect to statistics on their GitHub repositories:

When comparing Vue vs React, Vue appears to have a larger number of watchers, starts, and forks, further highlighting its popularity amongst users and its value in comparison to React. However, it’s interesting to note that the number of contributors for Vue and lower than both Angular and React.

This could be because Vue is driven entirely by an open-source community, whereas Angular and React have a significant share of Google and Facebook.

All three show significant development activity.

Speed of development

The structure of a framework and its surrounding community helps understand its ecosystem. Developers’ understanding of respective framework and their ability to utilize them plays a role in the speed of development.

Angular and React are maintained by a corporate set of professionals, whereas Vue has more of an open-source community and a dedicated team. This means that Angular has more extensive documentation and built-in solutions. This also means that rich plugins and third-party add-ons are a benefit of Vue, making it hard to say for sure which is best when it comes to speed of development.

Migrations

One of the biggest worries is having a framework update and it messing up your code. Angular plans major updates every six months but there is a period of another six months which gives users the time of two release cycles to make any necessary changes.

When looking at Angular vs React, Facebook has stated that stability is most important to them and as a result, upgrades in React are usually the easiest to migrate.

Vue states that much is the same between Vue 2 and Vue 3 and there are migration helper tools in place that can help assess the status of your app.

Components

As you probably already know, components are a vital part of all three frameworks, A component usually gets an input and its behavior changes based on it. This behavior change generally manifests as a change in the UI.

In Angular, components are referred to as directives. This is just a marker on DOM elements in which Angular can track and attach specific behaviors too. Angular separates the UI components as attributes of HTML tags and their behaviors in the form of JavaScript code. When looking at Angular vs React, this is the main feature that sets them apart.

React instead combines the UI and behavior of components. The same part of the code is responsible for creating a UI element dictating its behavior.

UI and behaviors are also a part of components in Vue, which makes things a little more intuitive.  Vue is highly customizable, allowing you to combine the UI and behavior of components from within a script.

Performance

All frameworks are very fast, with only some drawbacks to each one. Vue performs better when it comes to memory allocation whereas the code written in Angular needs to be fully rendered on the server side. Only then can it be downloaded and run into the app or browser. As a result of this, Angular may be sometimes slower during the start-up stage.

Although Vue is the fastest, Angular performs much better when it comes to DOM manipulation.

According to data, Vue and React’s performance difference are very subtly, proving they are both very similar in performance.

Scalability

Angular’s design provides users with scalability, with its modular development structure. In comparison to this, Vue is a lightweight framework, although it can still provide scalability within an already built application. Its only drawback is that scaling within Vue might require a larger strategy and using separate plugins.

React also provides scalable development. It has a great view framework to build re-usable and scalable components. For this one, however, Angular takes the crown.

Security

All Vue and Angular and React have built-in protections from vulnerabilities and attacks.

Vue’s protection includes escaping HTML content and attribute bindings. Angular has a similar process in place, which prevents cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery (XSRF) and cross-site inclusion (XSSI). Similarly, React offers built-in defenses against XXS, but these are not 100% effective.

It is important to remember that the security of the code often lies in the hands of the developer. It’s important to use best practices such as updating a framework in time, using trusted templates, plugins, and APIs, and complying with security documentation. This is the best way to protect your product and its users.

Learning React, Vue and Angular

Learning how to use each of these frameworks is crucial in determining which is best. Let’s have a look at how easy it is to get to grips with each one:

Angular – Angular has a steep learning curve and mastering it requires users to become familiar with other concepts such as TypeScript and MVC. It can take a while to learn Angular, the benefits of understanding how front-end works are unmatched.

React- React offers a Getting Started guide that guides users to ser up in about an hour. React, as mentioned, is not a complete framework and advanced features require the use of third-party libraries, meaning the learning curve here can be a little easier, depending on the path you take when it comes to additional functionality.

Vue- As view provides higher customizability, it is easier to learn than Angular or React. Vue has an overlap in functionality with both Angular and React, so transitioning from one to the other should be an easy option. Simplicity and flexibility aren’t great with Vue, however, allowing poor code and making it difficult to debug and test.

Conclusion

To conclude, after looking at each framework in-depth, we conclude that there is no right choice for anyone.

Angular is the most mature of the frameworks and is essentially the complete package. It does have a steep learning curve and it can take time to get your head around some of the concepts, which would understandably put off some new developers. It is a great choice for large companies that are already familiar with TypeScript.

React has a huge number of contributions from the community. It has recently gained widespread acceptance and is great for someone getting started with front-end JavaScript frameworks and start-ups who enjoy some flexibility.

Finally, Vue is the newest framework, without the backing of a major company. Despite this, it has done very well and become popular amongst those who enjoy simplicity and flexibility at the same time.

Each one has its benefits and drawbacks, as listed above. Depending on the project you’re working on, one or the other is going to be more suitable than the rest. It’s super important to do extensive research before deciding, especially when working on business ventures as opposed to personal projects.

Which framework do you think is the best? If you want to talk about how we can help with your next project, let’s talk.