React, Angular, and Vue: Which One Is Best and Why

BOUNTY: Angular vs. React vs. Vue: Web Development

In today’s development world, technologies are growing very fast and change rapidly, with many development tools appearing to solve different development problems. In this discussion, we will compare three of the most popular technologies for front-end development – Angular, React, and Vue. We are discussing this comparison on the basis of project architecture or from a developer's point of view who is going to choose a technology for a new project. So we first need to make a clear decision of whether we want to develop a Single Page Application (SPA) or a standard, multi-page app.

Library or Framework?

So before going into a deeper comparison, we first need to decide which one is required – a library or a framework? Actually, libraries are designed to perform some specific task and they normally are not complex. So if we constructing our application using libraries, then we need to select a library for every task, as well as to set up task runners. The main advantage of a library is that we have full control over the application. But the problem is that it takes much more time to set up the project.

On the other side, frameworks are designed for performing more complex things. So if we use a framework, then it will automatically solve many problems for us. Every framework has a predefined design or structure, including many libraries and set up runners. The main advantage of a framework is that the development process is much faster because it contains all the possible libraries which we require to perform different tasks.  But a framework has a stricter design than a library.

React is a library for building user interfaces whereas Angular and Vue are frameworks for the same purpose.  

Life Cycle and Strategic Comparison

React, first released in March 2013, is described as a JavaScript library. React is developed and maintained by Facebook. Facebook uses React for many components on several pages, but not for creating a single page application. React is also used by Uber, Netflix, Twitter, Reddit, Udemy, Paypal, Walmart, and others.

Angular is a TypeScript-based JavaScript framework. It is developed and maintained by Google. It was first released in October 2010, but has since undergone several updates and is currently on Angular 6. Angular is described as a “Superheroic JavaScript MVW Framework.” Angular is used by Google, Wix, weather.com, Forbes, and others.

Vue is one of the most rapidly growing JavaScript frameworks in today's world. Vue is described as an “Intuitive, Fast and Composable MVVM for building interactive interfaces.” It was first released in February 2014. It is the brainchild of ex-Google employee Evan You. In 2016, Vue version 2 was released. It is used by Alibaba, Baidu, GitLab, and others.

Angular, React, and Vue are all available under the MIT License.

Core Development

As per the above discussion, Angular and React are supported and used by big companies like Facebook, Google, Whatsapp, etc. Currently, Google uses Angular in their lot of projects like AdWords UI (implemented with Angular and Dart). Whereas Vue is mainly used by individuals on small sized projects. Let's have a look at some statistics found on GitHub:

• Angular has more than 25,000 stars and 463 contributors.

• React has more than 70,000 stars and more than 1,000 contributors.

• Vue has almost 60,000 stars and only 120 contributors.

Flexibility

We can start our development work with React or Vue by simply adding the JavaScript library to the source application. But this is not possible with the Angular since it uses TypeScript. As, in today’s web development world, we are approaching more towards microservices and micro apps, React and Vue give us more control over the size of an application by choosing only those things which are really required. Angular works best as a framework for SPA-based applications.

Performance

In the case the size of a library or a framework, Angular is quite large with respect to other options. The gzipped file size is 143k, compared to 23k for Vue and 43k for React. React and Vue both use the Virtual DOM which improves performance in the browser’s DOM. In the overall analysis, Vue has great performance and the deepest memory allocation of the three. But all three of these options are really very close to each other in respect to performance.

If you want to check the source, then you can visit the GitHub repositories below:

• Angular 

• React

• Vue

Conclusion

React, Angular, and Vue are all very useful for development and none of them are clearly better than the others. So below I've given a table which will demonstrate when to choose which one:

If you still cannot decide which one you need to choose, I'd suggest you first learn React, then Vue, and then Angular. Because the first two are mainly based on JavaScript and the third one is totally based on TypeScript.