Angular vs. React vs. Vue: Top Developer’s choice in 2023

Welcome to the ultimate guide on learning the top developer’s choice in 2023, along with what could be your next best bet on choosing a frontend tech stack for making web applications.

The debate over whether Vue is better than React or whether the original giant Angular falls really short compared to React is a very heated one that will continue to soar. But with a good look over brief information of these three, we can get an idea of what to choose next.

In this article guide, we will have three top contenders; Angular vs. React.js vs. Vue.js, and we will check what is the top developer’s choice in terms of various parameters. Let’s begin!

A short intro of our competitors

Before we dive deep into comparing each of these, let’s take a quick look at what each of these is:

Angular: Angular is a JavaScript framework developed by Google and first released in 2010. It’s a TypeScript based, and it went through a significant revamp in 2016 when Angular 2 was removed, and the creators dropped the original AngularJS name.

React: React (or React.js) is a JavaScript library developed by Facebook and initially released in 2013. It is specifically targeted at building User Interfaces (UIs) for modern web applications. It doesn’t come with TypeScript out-of-the-box, but you can add it.

Vue: Vue (or Vue.js) is a JavaScript framework developed by ex-Google team member Evan You in 2014. That means was not made by a single company but by an individual, but that didn’t stop it from becoming insanely popular, and it shows as if it’s supported by thousands of contributors.

Now that you know a bit about them, it’s time to understand what should be our basis on how to choose a new framework/library amongst our three significant contenders.

Understanding how to choose a framework/library

Next time you’re confused about how to pick a tech stack, you can consider the following points:

Availability of learning resources: While these technologies have an official website for tremendous and ‘source of truth’ information, we will still need some external help to learn most of the core concepts. Be it an online course material (if the framework developers partner it, it’s already good!), books, tutorials (written/video-based), etc.

A well-made online resource will help you cut the learning curve and get your fear of learning a new topic reasonably quickly. The best thing to do first is to look out for resource material provided by the framework developers.

Popularity: this isn’t like the “go with the hype!” thing. There’s a difference between choosing something your business needs and something that just ‘looks cool.’

Usually, few developers are using a tech that isn’t so popular. The main question comes down to what happens if you find yourself stuck with a problem while working on not-so-popular tech and there isn’t a community where you can ask for help?

Core features: after understanding each of these technologies, you would want to understand the core features they provide that suit your application development needs.

Things like routing, form validation, state management, and HTTP communication are all core and essential things every major application needs. Watch out for these.

Apart from these three points, it would be best if you also question the following:

• If your project is highly scalable, is that framework or library mature enough to handle the entire project development?
• While working with a team, is it easy for you or your peers to find developers with expertise in the required technology?
• Did you have good information on the performance, syntax, and learning the complexity of each of these three frameworks/libraries?

With those points stated, I guess it will be enough for you to get a starting point on how to choose a specific tech.

Pros and Cons of our contenders
Let’s look at what each of them provides, the good and the bad, starting with React.

Pros of React:

• It’s well maintained, documented, supported, and timely updated by the team at Facebook.
• It’s flexible in structure.
• Its ability to create reusable and easy-to-test components is widely used and appreciated.
• It has a one-way data-binding approach.
• It has a relatively more straightforward learning curve as it uses JavaScript primarily.

Cons of React:

• It’s just a library to build UIs, not an entire framework, so you have to check other options if you need framework-specific features.
• Being highly extensive comes with a con of looking out of our tech stack for little features and making too many choices from time to time.
• Development speed suffers as developers constantly need to re-learn the process of optimizing for performance between development and production modes.

Pros of Angular:

• Angular has a massive community, defined implementation methodology, and is used with large apps.
• It has very detailed technical documentation.
• It follows a one-way data-binding approach and the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) pattern.
• Being an entire framework, you already have built-in dependencies in modules, so you don’t have to look for third-party packages that much.
• It embraces the Angular CLI tool and works excellent with expanding, scaling, and developing large-scale projects.

Cons of Angular:

• It has a very steep learning curve as you will need to know other technologies like TypeScript, RxJS, etc., apart from the usual ones like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• It’s not well suited for beginners who have only worked with developing static webpages and not dynamic, scalable, and performant web apps.
• If you have an older version of Angular running, it has many migration issues to the newer one.
• It has a layered architecture and isn’t much easy to debug apps initially.
• It comes with concepts of dependency injection and inversion of control.

Pros of Vue:

• It has very up-to-date, easy-to-follow documentation along with the ability to grab Vue.js templates from the official website.
• It provides both flexibility and simplicity for the application development process.
• It has a short learning curve as the structure is easy to follow, and the syntax is easy to understand.
• It comes with two-way data binding approach.
• It has flexible integrations to set up additional tools.

Cons of Vue:

• It has a relatively small community and is maintained by a small team.
• There is a limited number of plugins available.
• There’s a bit of difficulty in mobile support.
• There’s a lack of scalability when compared with the other two technologies.

Popularity and market trends

As each of these three are open-sourced on GitHub, let’s take a quick look at how popular they are in the following table:

As you can see from the table above, Vue leads with the number of stars and comes very close to a number of forks as per the data. Despite not being backed by large corporations like Facebook (Reactjs) and Google (Angular), it holds the number in terms of popularity and trendiness.

However, this doesn’t mean people don’t talk about or use Angular or React. Google uses a lot of Angular in its own projects. Other industry giants like PayPal, Samsung, Forbes, etc. Talking about React, it’s used by Facebook itself and Instagram, Airbnb, Netflix, Dropbox, and more!

Market trends

But what about the actual data collected via surveys? Let’s now take a look at different market trends.

1. Job demand

According to Radity‘s data, different locations have different job results. But in general, what we can see is that number of jobs in both Angular and React are high compared to Vue. That’s more likely because Vue is a relatively new tool for companies to adopt, and Angular/React has been used from the beginning.

In conclusion, if you’re looking for a job at a company after learning, better chances are that you’ll get a role as an Angular or React developer.

2. Developer usage

This is our second criteria where we look at trends across the usage of these tools by developers, both personal and work projects.

If we were to look at the data from npmtrends.com, we could clearly see who’s the actual king in terms of downloads in the past year. React stands out from others by quite a good margin leaving Vue and Angular in second and third positions, respectively.

Now take a look at the image below…

..this data comes from Google Trends search results, and here you can see a different story when it comes to Vue. This shows there aren’t that many searches in the past year for Vue compared with others. It looks like Angular and React are competing tightly, leaving Vue alone.

Talking about surveys and community, the Stack Overflow Trends website shows us that React is leaving behind its competitors by a considerable margin, and Angular is declining. At the same time, Vue has a relatively more minor but a curve that will need more time to complete.

In conclusion, we are seeing positive growth with all these tools. There’s a disproportionate split between GitHub stars (the table we shared above) and actual usage of Vue.js. Maybe we will see Vue go head-to-head with either React or Angular in the future.

3. Developer opinion
This data trend will show us how much a framework/library developers enjoy.

According to the State of JavaScript 2021 survey, it shows that although React had an entirely bumpy journey over the years, in general, it gets a spot in the top 3 positions, coming behind only last year due to the influx of new technologies like Solid and Svelte.

Vue had a great 2018 year, but naturally, it went as the 2nd most satisfied framework by developers behind React.

As for Angular, it’s quite a bad result as overpowered by new cool and trendy frameworks. But that doesn’t mean developers are totally unsatisfied with it!

In conclusion, due to the significant number of new libraries/frameworks like Remix, Next, and Gatsby being built on top of React and its tremendous community and resource support, React is usually trendy and equally loved. Vue has a small part in itself, which is a big deal when we compare it with other giants already used in thousands of big projects.

Quick note: The graphs, tables, and data you see above allow you to see a snapshot of the popularity of these tools. It would be best if you did not start learning something that has 500 more stars on GitHub or even takes 1st place in a graph.

Ideally, you would want to make sure you know what features, resources, and the job market is there rather than riding on the ‘hype train’.

Comparing performance
App performance is a critical thing to consider while developing web apps. Here we will talk a bit about the performance of each of the three technologies:

React: One great advantage React has is in the performance; with a gzipped size of just 34.8KB, it has excellent preference due to several factors:

• It uses Virtual DOM (V-DOM) for maximum efficiency that compares changes when nodes’ view is modified.
• It supports Server-Sider-Rendering (SSR) technique for performance, SEO visibility, and social sharing features.
• It supports tree-shaking and bundling to minimize the code spitted out to the browser to render.

Take a look at the official guide to optimizing React app performance here: https://reactjs.org/docs/optimizing-performance.html

Vue: Vue’s tooling performance is speedy. It even beats React’s gzipped size to be just 22.9KB! Here are some of the standard features it has:

• Similar to React, it uses V-DOM.
• It uses reactive and composable view components.
• It enables code splitting with bundlers like Rollup that create split chunks and lazy loading.

Take a look at the official guide to optimizing Vue app performance here: https://vuejs.org/guide/best-practices/performance.html

Angular: Angular might not be as famous for its big gzipped size of 111KB, but here are a few points you need to know:

• It creates a watcher every time the view updates. By this, the new values are compared with the old ones.
• Comparatively, it generates heavier applications.
• It provides both AOT (Ahead Of Time) and JIT (Just In Time) compilations.

Take a look at the official guide to optimizing Angular app performance here: https://angular.io/guide/upgrade-performance

Comparing a basic file

It’s time to get really techie here. Usually, index.js is the starting point of many applications for frontend web application development. In this section, let’s give you a bit of a taste of how each of the three of these compares in code.

Angular’s app component file:

<code>// app.component.ts</code>

import { Component } from '@angular/core';

@Component({
 selector: 'app-root',
 templateUrl: './app.component.html',
 styleUrls: ['./app.component.css']
})

export class AppComponent { }

You can find detailed information about this code on the official tutorial: https://angular.io/start#take-a-tour-of-the-example-application

React’s index file:

<code>// index.js</code>import React from "react";
import ReactDOM from "react-dom";
import App from "./App.js";  

ReactDOM.render(   
    <App /> ,
  document.getElementById("root")
);

You can find detailed information about this code on the official docs: https://reactjs.org/docs/getting-started.html#learn-react

Vue’s index file:

<code>// index.js</code>
import { createApp } from 'vue'
import App from './App.vue'

createApp(App).mount('#app')

You can find detailed information about this code on the official docs: https://vuejs.org/guide/quick-start.html

And finally, a summary…
After learning all about our three contenders, it’s time that we summarise everything we got to know for an easy understanding. Here’s a table that summarises everything you need to know:

So what’s the top developer choice?

Getting all of that information may be a bit overwhelming in deciding which one to choose in one go, but overall here’s how you should choose your next framework/library:

Angular is the most mature one of all and is a complete framework with a good backing of contributors. The learning curve is high, and it might not be a good choice for new developers.

You should use Angular if you’re working in a company with large teams/developers who are already working with large, scalable apps written in TypeScript.

React is probably the most popular all around and has a massive number of contributions and resources for learning. The job market is excellent, and many new frameworks are regularly built on top of it.

You should use React if you’re getting started with frontend JavaScript frameworks or working in a startup with some flexibility. You can also create a side project as it doesn’t have a steep learning curve, and it integrates seamlessly with other tech stacks.

Vue may be the newest of these three but is strongly competing with them! Many tech giants are incorporating it instead of Angular/React for the primary frontend tech stack. The learning curve is really small, but there aren’t as many jobs as the other two.

You should choose Vue if you prefer simplicity along with extra flexibility in developing applications.

In this detailed Angular vs. React vs. Vue blog, you got to learn about our three contenders, how to choose a framework/library in general, taking in some crucial points, and the pros and cons of each. Then we saw the numbers and percentages as to which one is more popular amongst developers along with market share.

Admin Dashboard and Website Templates:
Angular Templates
React Templates
Vue Templates

Towards the end, we compared the performance and an entry-point file and finally concluded which one you should choose. We hope this guide helps you when you think about comparing React, Vue, and Angular next time.