ReactJS vs VueJS vs AngularJS: Web Framework Comparison

Vue.js is another JavaScript framework and many of you know about it already. You can read our previous blog to get a basic understanding about this technology in detail. To differentiate between frameworks is tough as each of them has its own special features depending on the applications, but to know the differences, makes it easy to compare and understand which technology would be better for your business application. So, here is an unbiased comparison between Vue.js and other frameworks.

“React.js vs Vue.js”

According to the State of JavaScript 2018, React.js and Vue.js have the highest satisfaction rate. React.js is also a framework which shares many similarities with Vue.js and has many different features too. The biggest difference is that React.js is a library and Vue is a framework. Beginning with runtime performance, both are efficient and provide better speed and performance. Let’s compare these two on other important features:

Component dependencies

When we talk about React.js, the state change of any component generates the re-render of the entire component sub-tree, starting at that component. In this case the developer has to either use PureComponent or shouldComponentUpdate to avoid unnecessary re-renders of child components. Also, there are scenarios when you may not be able to rely on such optimizations.

While on the other hand, in Vue, a component’s dependencies are automatically tracked during its render. This feature helps the system to find out exactly which components actually need to re-render when state changes. ShouldComponentUpdate is automatically implemented for each component, hence, leading to hassle free development.

Template and design

React.js follows its JavaScript nature in which the logic and the markup are regarded as one structure. React.js achieves this feature with the use of JSX which is an abstraction of React.createElement method and is used to create Virtual DOM entities. The use of JSX offers smoother developer experience, debugging, and better code readability than the createElement method.

The approach for templates and styling is different and conservative in Vue. Logic and markup is separated. Every valid HTML is also a proper Vue template. Inside the templates, the framework offers a lot of syntactic sugars like conditionals, iterations, etc.

Extending applications

Extending React.js with third party libraries is quite simple.Available vendor libraries for React.js Developers are nothing but components that enhance the existing components. If you take the example of the React.js-Redux library, it uses the Context API and exposes a higher-order component that makes state accessible from every component of choice.

Vue has many third-party libraries that are in the form of plugins because of the built-in plugin system that can be added using Vue.js method.

“Angularjs vs Vuejs”

Vue.js shares many similarities with AngularJS in its syntax because AngularJS was like an inspiration in the development of Vue. Wherein there were a few complexities in Angular.Js there were many improvements in Vue. A few differences are mentioned below:

Complexity

Vue is much simpler than AngularJS. Be it API or design, every process is completed easily and in less time. Building non-trivial applications using Vue is possible in a day whereas Angular takes more time and efforts.

Flexibility

Flexibility is more in Vue as it allows the developer to customize as per the business requirements. Whereas in AngularJS, your application should be structured according to the framework opinions. Vue’s flexibility is quite beneficial but sometimes it becomes confusing as the developer first has to decide the template and then start coding, that might result into delays.

Data binding

AngularJS uses two-way binding while Vue utilizes a one-way data flow between components. This makes the flow of data easier and quicker

Directives and Components

Vue has separate directives and components. Directives are for binding DOM manipulations only, while components are self-contained units that have their own view and data logic. In AngularJS, directives and components do not have a clear difference. In fact, components are just a specific kind of directive.

Runtime Performance

AngularJS is slow when there are a lot of watchers. If there is any change it needs to be re-evaluated. AngularJS users often have to resort to esoteric techniques to get around the digest cycle, and in some situations, there’s no way to optimize a scope with many watchers.

On the other hand, Vue uses a transparent dependency-tracking observation system with async queuing. In this all changes trigger independently unless they have explicit dependency relationships. Runtime performance of Vue is much easier and better because its checking procedure is clean.

“Angular vs Vue”

Angular is completely different from AngularJS. A few features that make it different are a first-class component system, rewritten implementation details and entirely changed API. Have a look at these comparisons:

TypeScript

Angular mostly requires TypeScript as almost all its documentation and learning resources are based on TypeScript. It is helpful in static type checking for large-scale applications, and can be a big productivity enhancer for developers with backgrounds in Java and C#.

But there are cases when the developers do want to use Typescript. For instance, in many smaller-scale use cases, introducing a type system may result in more complexities than productivity gain. In those cases, using Vue is beneficial.

Though Vue is not as deeply integrated with Typescript as Angular is, Vue offers official typing and official decorator for those who want to use TypeScript with Vue.

Size

Angular has been able to reduce its size with AOT compilation and tree-shaking. But still a full-featured Vue 2 with Vuex + Vue Router included (~30KB gzipped) is lighter than, AOT-compiled application generated by angular-cli (~65KB gzipped).

Flexibility

Vue is more flexible than Angular, offering official support for a variety of build systems, with no restrictions on how you structure your application. This flexibility in the framework is sometimes interesting for the developers but sometimes they find it too demanding.

Conclusion

Frameworks like Ember and Knockout are also used by many developers which have many different functionalities than Vue. Choosing the right framework depends upon your business priorities. Hire Vuejs developers and they will recommend you what goes great with your requirements. Vue, Angular or React.js, all the three have one or the other feature that make your application or software development easy, quick and effective. Programmers.io offers excellent teams, guaranteed SLAs and flexible hiring models.