Developing a front-end infrastructure requires a lot of consideration, discussion, planning, management, and implementation. One of the first judgments we must make is choosing a front-end framework to build a product. Some front-end frameworks that have evolved as the most favored among web developers and causing the dilemma are Angular, ReactJS, and VueJS. It is evident from the StackOverflow Technical Survey 2023, which shows that 40.58% of developers prefer ReactJS, 17.46% of developers like to work with Angular, and 16.38% of developers love working on VueJS.
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All these three frameworks use JavaScript as the programming language and are often referred to as front-end JavaScript frameworks. The JavaScript framework we choose influences nearly everything: speed, scalability, SEO(Search Engine Optimization), development cost, compatibility with additional technologies like mobile apps, related software, etc. Therefore, this article will guide you in choosing the right framework between Angular vs React vs Vue.
What Is Angular?
Angular was first launched by Google in 2016 as a sequel to AngularJS, which was released in 2010. Angular is a fully-fledged front-end framework and platform for creating single-page web applications with the help of HTML and TypeScript. Angular is wholly written in TypeScript and is open-source and free. It implements optional and core functionality as a set of TypeScript libraries that we import into our applications.
Note: Many people confuse Angular with AngularJS, but the primary difference is that Angular uses TypeScript for development, while AngularJS uses JavaScript.
Various popular websites (like Gmail, Youtube, Upwork, Delta, Forbes, BMW Find a Dealer, etc.) use Angular as their front-end Framework due to its outstanding features.
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Features Of Angular
PWA (Progressive Web Applications) can be built using Angular. It provides an app-like experience to the users using its modern web capabilities.
Applications built over Angular load faster; moreover, Angular allows us to render the code into plain HTML & CSS.
Angular allows developers to produce high-end animations that enrich the user experience.
Angular has command-line tools that assist developers in building and testing a web application.
The in-built dependency injection of Angular streamlines application development.
The best thing about Angular is its frequent updates. It keeps improving its CDK (Component Development Kit) with version upgrades.
Testing Angular based web apps is very efficient because of the Jasmin framework.
Angular uses TypeScript, which provides more effective bug detection and thereby reduces overall development time.
What is React?
React (ReactJS or React.js) is a popular, open-source, and free front-end JavaScript library for developing user interfaces based on components. It was first released in May 2013. It is upheld and maintained by Meta (formerly Facebook) and a community of developers and companies.
React is used to develop single-page web apps, mobile applications, or server-rendered applications with frameworks like React Native or Next.js. Because React is only concerned with the user interface and rendering components to the DOM, React applications often rely on libraries for routing and other client-side functionality.
React is typically used to develop web apps that demand constant data updates on their UIs. Some popular websites using React as its development framework are Facebook, Instagram, Uber Eats, Salesforce, Dropbox, Airbnb, and many more.
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Features Of React JS
React uses the virtual DOM (Document Object Model) representation to render the entire UI when the web app or its data is changed. A virtual DOM is a DOM representation that forms a virtual replica of the actual DOM object.
Everything in ReactJS is treated as a component. These components are reusable, which helps developers in code maintenance and scalability when working on larger projects.
React utilizes a unidirectional data flow, pushing developers to update components via the callback feature rather than directly editing them. This highly increases the web app’s flexibility, leading to increased efficiency.
Everything in React is a component. This feature makes React code more user-friendly and readable, especially for bug fixes.
React provides end to end testing using popular tools like Cypress and Jest.
Codes written in React are easy to test, and because of unidirectional data flow, written code can not be accidentally altered down the road. This eradicates the need for regression testing throughout the life of our build.
What is Vue?
Vue (popularly known as Vue.js or VueJS) is an open-source, progressive front-end JavaScript framework that earned widespread popularity for building single-page applications. Vue.js was initially introduced in 2014 and quickly grabbed developers’ attention because of its easy learning curve and precise interface.
VueJS mixes the best of both Angular and React. It has bi-directional data binding like Angular and has code flexibility like React. Because of this, Vue is gaining popularity among top front-end JavaScript frameworks like Angular vs React vs Vue. Vue is primarily used when a high-performance, lightweight, intuitive web app is required. These applications quickly become ready for the market without compromising performance or functionalities.
Some big names in the market using Vue.js are Alibaba, Xiaomi, Adobe, Trivago, and many more.
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Features Of Vue JS
Vue.js uses virtual DOM, just like React.js. This feature is useful in optimizing and speed; it is less costly, and the changes can be done faster.
The bi-directional data binding feature enables Vue.js to assign or manipulate values to HTML attributes, update the style, and allocate classes with the help of a binding directive (v-bind) available with VueJS.
Vue.js has built-in directives, such as v-on, v-bind, v-show, v-if, v-else, and v-model, that handle events or perform various actions on the front-end.
Vue.js script is fast and high-performing and yet very lightweight.
Vue.js provides various ways to apply a transition to HTML elements when they are updated, added, or removed from the DOM. Vue has an in-built transition component that can be wrapped around the element for a transition effect.
There are a lot of plugins and tools available for performing unit testing on VueJS components, but the official website of Vue recommends only two tools: Vitest and Cypress.
Watchers are applied automatically to data that changes in Vue.js. For example, in a form input element, we need not add any additional event handler. Watcher manages any data modifications, making the code fast and straightforward.
Comparing Advantages and Disadvantages
Let’s compare their advantages and disadvantages. This comparison will help us understand which framework performs better in which conditions.
Advantages Of Angular
Angular is mainly used to create extensive and complex web apps that can be scalable because of its listed advantages.
Custom Components: Angular enables developers to create custom components that can be used to pack functionality and rendering logic, thus creating custom and reusable components. This makes the development faster and the web app more scalable.
Data Binding: Angular uses the two-way data binding. As the name indicates, two-way data binding is a mechanism where data flows from the view to the component and back. This data flow ensures that the view and the component are always in sync. Any modifications made on either end are instantly reflected on both.
This enables users to move data from code to the view effortlessly and respond to user actions without writing any code manually.Dependency Injection: Angular uses a Dependency Injection or DI design pattern, which makes it incredibly efficient. This paradigm permits modules, classes, and components to be interdependent while preserving consistency. This improves the reusability and testability of the same services.
Testing: Angular utilizes the Jasmine testing framework that provides multiple functionalities such as fakes, spies, and pass-throughs to write test cases. Angular has been developed from scratch with testability in mind. Developers can test every part of their web application’s code, which is highly recommended.
Comprehensive: Angular is a full-fledged front-end framework that delivers out-of-the-box solutions like a built-in Dependency Injection system, HTTP Client, robust routing system, etc., for communication with the server, routing within our application, and more.
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Cross Browser Compatibility: Angular is compatible with multiple browsers and platforms. An Angular web app can efficiently run on all browsers (e.g., Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple’s Safari, Microsoft Edge, etc.) and OSes, such as Mac OS, Windows, and Linux.
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Disadvantages Of Angular
Angular comes with a lot of advantages, right? But it has a few disadvantages also. These disadvantages are mainly responsible for its lesser popularity than React JS. A few major disadvantages are as follows:
Steep Learning Curve: Angular comes with many concepts that all developers should know, such as components, directives, modules, decorators, services, dependency injection, templates, etc. Learning this complex framework can be difficult, especially for beginners. Additionally, developers must also learn TypeScript to use the framework.
Limited SEO Options: SEO is crucial for any business running on websites. SEO helps the search engine in finding your website on the web. Angular offers very limited SEO options and is hence often poorly accessible to search engine crawlers. To overcome this limitation, developers can use various external tools and libraries like Angular Universal for Server-Side Rendering, Ngx-seo library to manage meta tags, Scully to generate static HTML files to search engine crawlers, and NgOptimizedImage directive to optimize images.
Migration: Another reason why companies only sometimes use Angular is the hardship in porting legacy JS/jQuery based code to Angular-style architecture. Also, some new releases can be challenging to upgrade, and several are not backward-compatible.
Verbose and Complex: A common topic in the Angular community is its verbosity. This means significantly more code must be written to do even smaller tasks. It is also complex in comparison with other front-end frameworks.
Advantages Of React JS
React JS is mainly used to create single page web apps that mainly requires constant data updates on the UI based on API requests mainly. Let’s have a closer look at the advantages of React JS:
Declarative DOM: In React, the DOM is declarative. Developers can make interactive UI by updating the component’s state, and React handles updating the DOM according to the state. This implies that developers never interact with the DOM. Hence, it becomes easier to design interactive UI and debug them. Developers can change the program’s state and see how the UI will behave at that particular time in different scenarios. This makes the code easier to debug and predictable.
Faster Performance: React JS utilizes virtual DOM, which is a copy of real DOM. React uses an in-memory data structure cache to create the virtual DOM. Only the most recent changes are updated in the browser’s real DOM when any change is made in the program. This makes the web app built on React faster.
React Components: Everything in ReactJS is treated as a component. Developers can make and use their components in their web app for every functionality. These components are reusable, which helps developers in code maintenance and scalability when working on larger projects.
Cross Platform Compatibility: Code written in React can be used to develop web apps compatible with multiple browsers on almost all popular OS. The same code base can also be utilized to create an Android and IoS mobile app using React Native. This means the code is extensively reusable to build apps for various platforms.
Search Engine Friendly: Unlike Angular, React JS can be used to make web apps that are Search Engine friendly with relatively less effort. The Virtual DOM feature of React JS renders the web app more precise and yields the web app as a typical web page. This enables search bots to crawl through the React website and analyze the rank and relevance of the website on the search engine effortlessly.
Easy Learning Curve: The automatic rendering, component-based approach, and use of just simple JavaScript make React extremely easy to learn, create a web (and/or mobile apps), and maintain it. React mixes HTML and JavaScript concurrently to create a special syntax called JSX, which is relatively easier to learn and work with it.
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Huge Community: React has huge community support, including the developer’s team and other engineers. This community greatly helps Developers in case of any issue.
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Disadvantages Of React JS
Although the advantages of React JS often hides its disadvantages but as a good developer we must know them in order to choose the perfect framework for our requirements. Listed below are few disadvantages of React JS:
Huge File Size: Generally, Web apps built on React JS have comparatively larger file sizes because of multiple module dependencies.
Third Party Library Dependency: React covers the UI components only and nothing else. Developers have to invest more time in setting up supportive tools. These include setting up integration and routers to create a fully-fledged web or mobile app. This makes React dependent on third-party libraries. These external libraries can provoke version clashes while scaling the application due to its dependencies.
Lack of Updated Documentation: React JS is developing at a speedy rate. Its huge open-source community always contributes new tools and dependencies for enhanced features and performance. This quickly outdates the documentation. Its reliance on other libraries like Redux, react-router, etc. affects its documentation’s lifecycle.
Advantages of Vue JS
Vue JS is a mix of the best features of both Angular and React JS. Hence Vue JS brings the following advantages:
Best of Both Worlds (Angular and React): Since Vue Js is greatly inspired by the two most popular front-end frameworks i.e. React and Angular, it combines the best features of both these frameworks and rejects their limitations. For instance, like React, Vue JS utilizes the Virtual DOM but it uses automated dependency management to automate component rendering when the state is changed, unlike React, where we have to use Hooks to render components on state change.
Also, Vue JS uses some Angular-like features, such as templating syntax, but without needing to learn a new language (i.e. TypeScript in the case of Angular).Lightweight Apps: The apps built over Vue JS are very lightweight. A basic app built using Vue JS can be as low as 20kb in size. Sounds incredible right? It takes up no space on the disk, so the waiting time for it to download, install, and load significantly decreases.
Speed and High Performance: Web apps developed on top of Vue JS load exceptionally quickly, even on mobile devices because of its lightweight nature. However, this Vue JS lightweight feature does not impede the web app’s performance, resulting in a quick and effective web app.
No steep learning curve: Vue JS is very easy to learn and master. Beginners or anyone with some front-end development knowledge can conquer it within a few days. The only prerequisite to learning Vue JS is understanding the ‘big three’ web dev technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Component Based Architecture: One of the primary advantages of using Vue JS is that it has a single file component-based architecture utilizing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This makes the life of developers easy as every piece of code can be tested independently, and the coding is simple for developers to understand. Henceforth, this makes it easy to optimize and debug the application.
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Integrates With Other Frameworks: Vue JS is very flexible when it comes to integrating it with various other frameworks like React or Angular. This greatly helps developers who are familiar with other frameworks and looking to adopt Vue JS for UI customization and speed enhancement.
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Disadvantages Of Vue JS
There is no ideal technology out there on the internet. Even the most promising technologies have certain disadvantages and so does Vue JS. In this section, the disadvantages of Vue JS are highlighted.
Lack of scalability: Vue JS lacks the scalability that allows for building gigantic complex web apps. This can be because the framework is still an indie project (i.e., an open-source project) not supported by any tech giants. Having stated that Vue JS is continually growing and enhancing, this is undoubtedly less probable in the future.
Small Community: Many enhancements and events are ongoing on the community side, though the community is frankly small and comprises many non-English (primarily Chinese) speakers.
Lack Of Plugins: Vue JS is not yet as established as its counterparts like Angular and React; hence, it has fewer developed plugins than the latter. This can be improved in the future because it has been only nine years since the framework’s launch.
Non-English Documentation: As Vue JS evolved in China, a large user base was also found there. Inevitably, many of the guides, user manuals, forum advice, etc., are in Chinese, and only some things have been translated. Tools like Google Translate come in very handy in such scenarios.
Comparing Core Features: Angular vs React vs Vue
With the completion of the previous section, we have achieved a milestone in understanding these three popular frameworks (i.e. React vs Angular vs Vue). Now is the time to compare the core functionalities of these frameworks. These core features will greatly help you find your perfect web development companion.
Architecture: Angular vs React vs Vue
The architecture of these frameworks significantly decides the web app’s speed, performance, scalability, and optimization. Hence, we will study and compare the architecture of all these frameworks individually.
Angular
Angular is a full-fledged MVC (Model View Controller) framework. It directs how the web app should be structured and offers bi-directional data flow with real DOM. The architecture of Angular includes the below eight fundamental components, all of which are connected.
Components
Templates
Ng Modules
Metadata
Data Binding
Directives
Services
Dependency Injection
This full-fledged MVC framework provides developers with all the prospects for out-of-the-box programming such as
Templates based on HTML;
Encapsulation of CSS components;
Components testing utilities;
Ajax requests; Routing;
Dependency injection;
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Opportunities to create forms, etc.
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React JS
React JS, on the other hand, is not a complete framework but a library that provides the view, leaving the developer to determine how to create the Model and Controller. React presents three simple concepts to make interactive web apps, as given below.
React elements: JavaScript replica of HTML DOM. React JS offers an API, React.createElement, for creating React Element.
JSX: React provides a JavaScript extension to design the UI known as JSX. It is an XML-based, extensible markup language that supports HTML syntax with slight modification. This JSX can be assembled into React Elements and used to construct the user interface.
React component: The React component is the basic building block of the React apps. It uses React elements and JSX to design the user interface.
Vue Js
Vue JS framework is based upon the MVVM (Model — View — ViewModel) architecture pattern that links the View ( i.e. User Interface ) and the Model ( i.e. Data Objects ). This architecture has the following components:
View: It is a Presentation layer that represents the structure of DOM. Vue JS instances handle the DOM. It operates as a template for the ViewModel layer.
Model: It is a business logic layer that contains plain JavaScript Data models or objects that become reactive when built by Vue JS instances. Thus, whenever objects change, the View also updates simultaneously.
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View-Model: It is the layer responsible for transforming Model objects for state changes. The view layer responds to that property modifications and renders in DOM. It bridges the Model and View layers for creating a Vue instance with synchronized objects.
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Data Binding : Angular vs React vs Vue
Angular JS uses bi-directional data binding. As the name indicates, two-way data binding is a mechanism where data flows from the view to the component and back. This data flow ensures that the view and the component are always in sync. Any modifications made on either end are instantly reflected on both.
React JS has one-way data binding. This unidirectional data flow pushes developers to update components via the callback feature rather than directly editing them. This highly increases the web app’s flexibility, leading to increased efficiency.
Vue JS supports both two-way binding and one-way binding, which is known as reactive two-way data binding. Depending on the input type, it automatically picks up the correct way to update the elements. In addition to that, Vue JS provides a data binding directive called v-bind that is used to manipulate or assign values to HTML attributes, change the style, and assign classes.
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State Management: Angular vs React vs Vue
Angular provides its built-in state management library known as NgRx. This library is implemented using RxJS. NgRx provides several features for managing the state, including
A main storage that maintains all of the web app’s state
Actions that can be used to change the state
Reducers that can be used to update the state
Effects that are used to interact with external APIs
React does not have any built-in state management library. However, many third-party libraries are available, such as Redux and MobX. These libraries provide similar features to NgRx but are less tightly incorporated with React.
Just like Angular, Vue also has its state management library called Vuex. This state management library is similar to NgRx and Redux, but it is designed to be more lightweight and easier to use.
Scripting Language : Angular vs React vs Vue
Angular uses TypeScript programming language. Unlike JavaScript, TypeScript is a statically typed programming language, which means we must define the variable’s data type (number, string, character, array, etc.). This language would be more familiar for developers with an OOPs (object-oriented programming) background.
React mixes HTML and JavaScript concurrently to create a special syntax called JSX, which is relatively easier to learn and work with. This programming language enables React to use a component containing the logic and markup in the same file. React only demands the knowledge of JavaScript.
Vue JS uses plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript individually. The template-based technique for Vue JS is precise, and new developers can easily grasp this programming style encouraged by Vue.
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How to Choose Your Best Companion for Web Dev?
The answer to this question can change depending on one’s use cases. So let’s explore the condition that best suits these frameworks.
Use Cases for Angular
Considering all the features, advantages, and limitations of Angular, we can decide when to use Angular. Some popular use cases are:
Angular is more useful in building larger and more complex projects.
Angular is a more suitable option for trustworthy scalability.
Angular is preferred in projects that require heavy animations.
Developers should use Angular if they have time to learn Typescript.
Use Cases for React JS
React JS is not a full-fledged framework but a library that can be used to build interactive UI. It is the most popular and preferred framework among React vs Angular vs Vue because of its advantages and features. The great ecosystem of React is primarily used in the following cases:
Projects that require lots of reusable custom components.
Projects that require a simple yet interactive front end.
Projects built on top of React JS have the highest level of scalability;
React can be used to build Projects quickly. Hence projects with short deadlines prefer React JS.
Use Cases for Vue JS
Vue JS is a lightweight framework mainly used to build single-page apps. This framework has gained much popularity in the past few years and is growing very fast among Vue vs React vs Angular. So, let’s explore the use cases where Vue JS rocks.
Vue is preferred when lightweight yet high-performance applications are required;
Projects can be built using Vue by beginners who only know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Vue JS is only preferred in projects where scalability is not crucial.
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Vue Js comes in handy in building projects that have the shortest deadline.
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What’s Next?
It is apparant from the comparison between Angular vs React vs Vue that all of them possess substantial utility and power. The choice of which framework to employ ultimately hinges on the developer’s objectives and the project’s specific business requirements.
Regardless of the selected framework — be it Angular, React or Vue — it is imperative to conduct thorough testing under actual user conditions to ensure a seamless end-user experience. This entails comprehensive assessments for cross browser compatibility and mobile friendliness across a spectrum of mobile and desktop devices and web browsers.
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Conclusion
In this article for choosing the best framework among Angular vs React vs Vue, we learned that every framework has advantages and disadvantages, which implies that the framework should be selected depending upon the use cases during product development. Angular, React and Vue are all going through very active expansion. They frequently release newer versions and support the existing ones. As the current support status is high in each case through their community, you can safely pick any of these frameworks.
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