In development, the front-end and back-end tools are equally important. The front-end aspect is defined as the visual things users can see such as appearance. Studies conducted each year have shown a varying shift in what front-end tools are better. When referring to frameworks, there are 3 main ones at the top of every list—Angular, React, and Vue.

React

Created by Facebook, React was released in 2013. It quickly drew attention, largely in part due to the popularity of its parent company. React and Angular were often compared until React surpassed Angular in 2019 by having the highest number of downloads. Using a Document Object Model (DOM), which uses the JSX extension, HTML code is easily written. Coding in React itself is very simple if a developer knows JavaScript. Other benefits include:

  • Contains a large number of helpful tools for developers
  • Has a great community of developers to help it evolve
  • Small learning curve
  • Better performance levels

However, there are some disadvantages of React such as:

  • Harder to learn programming style
  • Doesn’t use HTML since it has JSX
  • Needs third-party libraries for creating UIs

Angular

Angular is open-sourced and was made by Google. Though it’s over 2 decades old, it’s still one of the best front-end frameworks for development. React and Vue have made Angular struggle to remain at the top but, with a significant update in 2016, it remains in the top 3 front-end frameworks. Some benefits are:

  • Allows developers to work on components separately
  • Has a big community and is backed by a large portion of developers
  • Component-based structure
  • High quality of programming

The major issues of Angular are its high learning curve and complicated syntax.

Vue

Similar to Angular, Vue was created by a developer from Google—Evan You. It was released in 2014, a year after React. You wanted to make a framework that would be more lightweight than Angular with a better performance speed. Advantages of Vue include:

  • Very lightweight (running at about 20KB)
  • Easily integrated with other programming languages
  • Small learning curve and quick performance

Some disadvantages are:

  • Lower number of developers that support the language
  • Struggles to work alongside other much bigger projects
  • Has a limited amount of features available

Overall Comparison

In terms of download numbers, React wins while Vue is next and Angular trails behind. Angular is considered old in the development industry. It has slowly become less effective or used compared to the other two. As an older language, the learning curve for Angular is steeper than React and Vue—the others being built to make learning the framework easy.

The size of the frameworks put Vue far ahead, but Angular once again falls to third, and React comes in second. Programming languages for the three see Angular as an outlier with its incorporation of TypeScript while Vue and React use JavaScript. JavaScript is more preferred for developers of any skill level because of its efficiency and other advantages.

A developer’s skills, time, dedication to the development project, available resources, and more all should contribute to choosing which kind of front-end framework is the best choice. In a general sense, it would be impossible to recommend one over the other two due to that.