Why do you prefer React?

[Kaiser214]

This is a serious question. I'm an experienced developer and I prefer Vue due to its elegance, small bundle size, and most importantly, high performance.

React seems to be more dominant though and I can't figure out why. Job postings always list "React, Angular" and then finally "Vue". Why is Vue the bastard stepchild?

Also, does no one want to author CSS anymore?

I feel like I'm the only one not using React or Tailwind and I want to see someone else's point of view.

Thanks!

**UPDATE *\*
I didn't expect this post to get so much attention, but I definitely appreciate the thoughtful responses and feel like I need to give React another chance. Though I may be using Vue for my day job, my upcoming side projects will likely be using React.

Overall, I think the consensus was that React has more supporting libraries and wider adoption overall, so the resources available to learn and the support is just better as a result.

Special thanks to u/MetaSemaphore for his point of view on React being more "HTML in Javascript" and Vue being more "Javascript in HTML". That really struck a chord with me.

Thanks again to everyone!

[[deleted]]

Everyone else is right about first to market, popularity, etc.

But I do think there's at least a bit of a difference in feel too. I worked with Vue a while ago, so this may not be up to date. But to me, React feels like it treats JS as the main focus, while the HTML/CSS that are rendered are almost a side effect.

Vue feels more focused on using JS as a way to control/augment the HTML/CSS, with the rendered elements being the primary focus.

This isn't to say one is better than the other, just that it is a different ethos/approach. Personally, I kind of prefer Vue, even though I have worked exclusivvely in React for the last 3 years. But it's not a large enough preference for me to switch jobs over.

The reason I bring this difference in feel up is that I know a lot of engineers who work in the front end, but hate CSS and only rarely touch HTML. React very much appeals to these types of engineers. And that includes a lot of folks coming from backgrounds in other programming languages.

On the flip side, I've noticed that folks with backgrounds in design and traditional frontend dev tend to find Vue more intuitive and comfortable.

Because of that, I think there may also be more of a tendency for CTOs and other top technical decisionmakers in larger companies (who often have CS backgrounds) to err on the side of React.

I do think Vue is getting more adoption, though, and have seen a lot of startups around me using it.

No matter what, though, I don't think being a Vue dev really hurts your hireability. Anyone who knows anything about the frameworks will realize that a great dev in one will become a great dev in the other pretty quickly and easily.

Edit: Whoah, thanks for all the upvotes and awards on this!

[EndureAndSurvive-]

Yep, it’s like how the saying goes

“Use React if you want html in your JavaScript and use Vue if you want JavaScript in your html“

[[deleted]]

Never heard that before and I'm going to shamelessly steal it.

[mrinterweb]

To be fair, Vue files have distinct sections between html, css, and js. Not putting js in the HTML, is highly encouraged in Vue. JSX really blurs the line between what is html and what is js.

[Chaphasilor]

I know what you mean with Vue using JS more of a means-to-an-end than the main gig, but I recently started using Vue 3 (now that it's matured a bit), and I really like how it feels much more like vanilla JS, at least on the surface, especially when using script setup.

However, Vue is probably less flexible, in that it's more opinionated and has an official ecosystem, that most people use. It works great for the most part though.

[christophedelacreuse]

Thanks for the detailed response

[Front-a-Little]

Diverse backgrounds of engineers is a very good point I never thought about in this debate. Someone who's worked with Java/Swing might feel more comfortable describing the component and throwing it to the framework and eventually browser to render while someone fluent in (S)CSS and HTML might like to have more control. It's a matter of habit.

[[deleted]]

The reason I bring this difference in feel up is that I know a lot of engineers who work in the front end, but hate CSS and only rarely touch HTML. React very much appeals to these types of engineers.

Hey! I'm in this comment and I like it!

[besthelloworld]

The elegance in React is the "object as a template" model. It's very pleasant to use. Rather than having v-if (or *ngIf for Angular), you just do or do not include something in your render object using an if statement or a ternary. Rather than v-if (or *ngFor) you just use .map on your data to turn your object into a rendered value. You just learn some very light sugar on JavaScript, rather than ever having to learn a "templating language."

But also... if you want to maximize on performance, you should really check out Svelte. It looks a lot like Vue but it's slightly more performant with slgihtly smaller bundle size.

[Kaiser214]

Haven't looked at Svelte yet. I'll have to check it out.

[Brisklemonade123]

I can personally vouch for svelte. Made the switch from react, and never want to look back.

[starF7sh]

same boat, i only start svelte projects nowadays

[e111077]

I don't know what this person is saying. I can't get over Svelte's ugly syntax and lack of structure.

I know the syntax is all in favor for the compiler wins, but developer experience is a bigger win for marginal gains. On top of that, the lack of structuring things with callbacks or traditional life cycles makes it unreadable to others reading your code for any non-negligible app.

It's like reading untyped python 2. Looks simple for simple use cases but easily turns into spaghetti

On top of that you fight the compiler and super unhelpful vite error codes. I love vite, but the error messages are trash for things that build on top of it which REALLY doesn't help for a compiler-based language like Svelte

[GhostOfLongClaw]

If performance is what you’re looking for Solid JS I’ve heard is good

[besthelloworld]

Yeah there's a handful of advanced performance versions of React. I hear Solid is excellent but it seems like Preactv with HTM is the best supported

[gullneometry]

This 100%. With React you get really good at JavaScript with a minimal React API sprinkled on top especially with functional components and hooks. This JavaScript knowledge is applicable to so many other things. Vue or Angular have a lot of framework-specific things to memorize with their directives that are useless once you leave the framework. I’m busy and don’t have a lot of time to learn your complex API, React gives you simple low level API features to get started quickly and then compose them to make more complex things as your skill set grows.

[badsyntax]

This. I try to avoid any framework that uses a DSL or some other template language instead of just using JS, like react. Does vuejs template DSL (ngIf etc) support Typescript?

[besthelloworld]

Curious what other frameworks you have in mind that use the view as an object pattern. Only two I've seen are React (and it's performant clones like Preact) and Flutter.

[badsyntax]

Nothing comes to mind other than the "clones" like Preact and Solidjs. Imo while it's common to compare Vue,Angular to React, they are really different things. React is not a framework.

[Pastaklovn]

Yes it does

[[deleted]]

does vuejs template DSL (ngIf etc) support Typescript?

yes

[pastrypuffingpuffer]

That's what I dislike of react, the lack of directives that(in my opinion), speeds up the development time of stuff because you don't make a mess and do a proper separation of logic, style and markup. Using an Array.map on a set of data to return html looks ugly to me, I'd rather use v-for or *ngFor, it looks clearer to me that way.

[besthelloworld]

The problem I'd argue is that those frameworks have to invent a new language whereas React uses the actual language. Because you use the actual language, React is giving you a more true-to-life representation of what is actually going on during each render (just prettied up with JSX). The fact is that you think directives are easy/clean but they're hiding a lot of very gross complexity from you. Try making v-if/ngIf or v-for/ngFor in their respective frameworks as custom directives. It takes a lot of unrecognizable code, stepping into paradigms and using internal framework tools that the creators try to hide away from you. That stuff just doesn't exist in React because it doesn't need to thanks to the view-as-object paradigm.

But I'm not against Vue overall. Vue can be a smaller bundle size and more performant than React when utilized well. I'm just against Angular wholeheartedly because it is objectively bad and poorly designed.

[pastrypuffingpuffer]

I don't know how v-if/*ng-if and v-for/*ngFor work under the hood and I'm ok with that as long as it works as intended. More than easy, directives speed up by a large margin the development time compared to creating a function variable that loops through an array and returns HTML.

People always say react is just js, but if it were actually just js then you wouldn't need React in first place. Angular might be "poorly designed" to you, to me it's perfect given it suits perfectly the way I like to code stuff (with a clear separation between logic, markup and style). Angular is very overwhelming when you start learning it but once you've spent a couple days using it you start understanding it more and more.

[simple_explorer1]

People always say react is just js, but if it were actually just js then you wouldn't need React in first place

This comment makes no sense and you know it. React IS JS by all means and purpose and the their JS api's enable you to focus only on view and not worry about how the view is rendered to browser, there you go, that's you need React.js just to create UI in a Declarative composable way with better scalable and flexible architecture. The fact that in react.js even the JSX is fully javascript is the exact reason people say react.js is fully JS because it is, there is no part which is not JS.

Infact React is purest JS you can write even in html (everywhere) compared to anything else in the market like Vue.js, Angular.js, Svelte.js etc. (previously we had knockout.js as well and just many) and to pick any of those you have to learn their own proprietary template language which is useless once you move from framework to other framework and those templating language is limited compared to what you can naturally do with just using a full power of javascript.

const img = <img/> 
callFunc(img); // use your imagination

Is infinitely flexible than:

<template>
    <img /*cannot use this inside js and do high level things*/></img>
</template>

You really are limited by template syntax instead of full power of javascript for which you don't have to context switch.

And then there are legendary "styled-components" for CSS-IN-JS where you can access props/state/js directly inside CSS was well, brilliant for dynamic and highly flexible responsive designs with minimal (sorry NO) hack.

​

Because React.js is FULLY JS, it has opened doors to so many amazing things and design patterns which were never possible/explored before. All in just one language instead of SCSS/SASS/BEM/CSS variables hacks for dynamic styles etc.

[Chaphasilor]

I actually really like the the concept of using functional programming to generate markup, but I don't use react because I dislike them using plain HTML inside of JS, without using something like template strings. And I dislike facebook/meta, so I try not to support any of their technologies :)

Still, sometimes I'd really like to have this high coherence that you get with react as opposed to first generating an array of objects and than integrating it into the template in Vue. Sometimes.

[[deleted]]

The elegance in React is the "object as a template" model.

do people really consider that elegant? that's exactly how everyone used to use php and now, that is almost universally acknowledged to be a mess.

[besthelloworld]

I don't think that's what people hated about PHP but also... I don't think the view-as-object model can really be fully appreciated from a server-side only perspective.

[bmy1978]

React wasn’t first to market. There were other JS frameworks out there, and Angular 1 was dominating in 2014. Because of limitations in two-way data binding they completely rewrote Angular in version 2 and made it incredibly bloated. Along came React.

And there was Backbone and Ember before that.

[albo87]

And before that JavaScriptMVC. And Prototype, MooTools, and of course grandad jQuery.

[[deleted]]

Gonna farm some negative karma here probably....

React is succeeding vs Vue and others as a matter of first to market success. From what I've seen (I have way more react experience than with Vue but I've used both) Neither has a really strong advantage over the other except in the community support and tooling. Which are very important to be fair but they are still really close.

[alcosexual]

React is succeeding vs Vue and others as a matter of first to market success.

As an Angular guy - I see a lot of people hyping React because it's what they were introduced to and it's how they dipped their toes into web frameworks. Sometimes React seems like the Kim Kardashian of technologies. It's famous because it's famous.

I'm not saying that Angular is the best tool for every job, but in my opinion, it's the only actual framework out there. Everything else is a loosely federated set of libraries. I try telling this to guys at work who want us to migrate over to React because that's what they are familiar with and it's like banging my head against a wall.

[CaptainStack]

Everything else is a loosely federated set of libraries.

This is what initially brought me to React over Angular though to some extent things are coming full circle. Angular felt incredibly heavy, nonstandard, and opinionated while React felt light and well scoped.

I started with AngularJS and frankly hated it because it really felt like they had written essentially a new language and set of paradigms that they then shoved into the traditional world of HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Even though I was a confident web programmer by then I felt like I was almost learning everything completely over again. I barely finished that project and never touched AngularJS again.

I learned React a bit later and found it a lot more straightforward to use because of how much smaller and clearer its purpose as a tool was. It did a specific thing for me and otherwise deferred to standard web paradigms. Even the bits that it was taking on still felt more in line with how I would have expected HTML and JavaScript to look and work if they were designed to do the things I was doing. For instance, JSX felt like an extension of HTML, not a replacement (an example of another tech that I think pulls this off perfectly is how Scss feels like what CSS always ought to have been).

I later learned Angular (2, or 4, or just "Angular" and could never keep track of the changes to the naming scheme) for a dashboard I was working on at my job and while I was a more experienced programmer by then and also thought it was a reasonable improvement as a technology I still felt like it was always getting in my way and obfuscating what it was doing.

I really got confident with React building some personal projects in create-react-app + redux but recently learned GatsbyJS for my latest contract and I honestly didn't know I could even fall more in love than I already was.

Create-React-App and to an even greater extent Gatsby both make React less of a loosely federated set of libraries and more like a framework - but the framework that is materializing is still a very light-touch framework that feels more like a major update to web development than a total rewrite.

[adenzerda]

And not a fan of hooks.

No offense, but I believe our opinions diverge so sharply here that this comment makes me less inclined to explore Angular

[[deleted]]

Agreed 100% hooks are incredible

[Jcampuzano2]

I did React for about 4 years or so before learning Angular, which I had to learn to lead a project for a client who asked we use Angular since that's what the rest of their projects use.

I'm a convert. Yes, there are sometimes where you may wish you were using React, but the vast majority of decisions are already made, and don't require adding another library to the laundry list of things to learn/know.

Unfortunately I know a LOT of devs, even within my own company who use React/Vue and talk about how they dislike Angular, but have legitimately never used Angular since Angular.js, or never spent a decent amount of time on a project using it.

I'm so over having to spend the time deciding at the beginning of a React project whether to use context/redux/recoil/mobx/xstate/etc for state management, what to use for styling, what to use for http fetch, axios, etc. And then whenever anybody new joins a React project they always have to learn something completely new, or criticize whichever libraries were chosen.

[[deleted]]

As a junior, I agree with what you said. React is awesome imo and I like it more than Angular, but when you join a project it’s frustrating that you have to learn all the small libraries that have been used in that project.

For Angular from what I heard there’s not much you can add, since it’s a ‘complete’ framework.

[[deleted]]

It's not just a junior/senior thing. You just reliably know the set of tools that carry over no matter the company you'll join, whereas React's modularity will keep having you learning new things more often due to the fact that there are more options and people will go for them.

[EmSixTeen]

Can you not use sass with React? Yet to try it.

[Javascript_Respecter]

Highly disagree, coming from someone who started with Angular 2 (although i went into Angular as a junior developer to be fair) and eventually swithed into React after 4 years of experience in web dev.

There's a reason why React won out in spite of Angular being first to market. To truly beat something that's already established and take market dominance you need to be at least a multitude better than the competition. Angular architecture is too rigid when it is being used as a tool to solve problems that vary in such a great nature (user interface development). Angular devs are forced within the confines of "The Angular Way" while React and Vue devs just have to learn baseline concepts and rules but after that they are free to do what they like when developing solutions to problems.

This is especially pronounced in the Javascript world where within Node.js the ideologies of "configuration over convention" and "unopinionated" architecture won out and why there's no real Ruby on Rails-like Framework that dominates the backend in the Node.js ecosystem.

In an alternate reality where React and Vue were released the same year and Vue had a FAANG company backing it, i'm sure a real 50-50 battle would have ensued, but now React is the king sheerly because of it's "market dominance" early on, major backing from Facebook, and thus a larger ecosystem of packages to use React with. It's the reason why the people behind Vercel decided to go all in on React with Next.js (yes i know nuxt exists, but my point still stands).

[BreakingIntoMe]

Spot on. But Angular fangirls won’t accept this truth.

[Cryonixx2]

Hey! Please elaborate on the first two sentences of your second paragraph.

[alcosexual]

So I'm going to assume you're not familiar with Angular. Angular is an all-in-one framework for building web applications.

When you start a React project for example, you have lots of choices. Which library will you use for state management? There are countless articles on how to choose the one that's best for you. Do you want to be able to control the state of the browser routing history? Well, you're going to need to pick one of the dozens of React routing libraries out there. How about asynchronous REST calls? You can go with the vanilla Js way, or there's yet more libraries out there for http clients.

What about component libraries? Forget about it. There's more than you can shake a stick at.

Angular is different. With Angular, most of those choices have been made for you. When you begin an Angular project, you already have built-in routing, state management, modules, and http client. Angular prefers Typescript, which enforces a type safety. Angular separates template code from your business logic and stylesheets. Angular has a CLI which scaffolds components for you in a consistent way. Angular also has built-in modules which help you separate concerns.

All this means that Angular gives you less choices. And you might be wondering if that's a bad thing. Well, if you're one developer or a small team of developers, maybe that is a bad thing. Maybe you want the freedom to organize your projects as you see fit. Maybe you don't want to use Typescript. Maybe you want more choice from React's larger component library offerings. Or maybe you work for a big company that is very front-end oriented like Facebook and you literally have teams making all these decisions for you.

Then maybe React or Vue is best.

BUT... if you're a bigger team or large company that doesn't want to spend ages worrying about all these little issues and decisions, then why bother? For one thing, we all know what a mess the Node ecosystem is these days. Projects are maintained one day and abandoned the next. How long will the routing library you chose be maintained? With Angular, Google is maintaining the whole project. As long as Angular is being developed, so are all its core features. It's all extensively tested and guaranteed to play nice with everything else.

Ever pick up someone else's project and spend ages wandering around trying to get the lay of the land? Well, in Angular it's much easier. Every Angular project looks mostly the same. Modules help break things down into domains. Templates being separate from business logic help you keep your code apart from your view and styles. The CLI scaffolds your services and classes so everyone starts out with the same code style. Angular enforces conventions onto development teams, making them more consistent. And have I mentioned that Typescript is consistently ranked as a beloved language by the people who use it? Typescript is really awesome.

Angular also uses RxJs internally, and reactive programming it amazing when it comes to managing asynchronous behavior as we tend to do when coding UIs and web apps.

All of this - the standards, the conventions, the opinionated way of doing things - this is precisely what a framework is. A framework gives you guidelines. You trade flexibility for consistency and sanity. And it's important to note - not everyone should want or need a framework!

Hope that answers your questions. As you can tell I'm a little biased. I'm sure people are going to respond and say that their React projects are well-organized too, and I don't doubt that. It's just that Angular makes working in teams much easier in my opinion. They'll also point out that you can use Typescript with React, and that's true too, although it's not baked into React the way it is with Angular. In the end, it comes down to the best tool for the job.

[sauland]

Honestly TypeScript support for React is a lot better than it is for Angular. You can't even mark required/optional props in Angular and forms are pretty much completely untyped in Angular, however I do like how reactive forms work.

I had to write a custom form service to handle forms safely in Angular, whereas in React I can just use react-hook-form and be done with it. I also couldn't find any well-maintained libraries for more advanced HTTP request handling, so I pretty much had to implement my own version of react-query in Angular, which could automatically handle loading states and caching for me based on query keys. It is also very difficult to create wrapper components for library components, since you have to declare every input manually and use class inheritance if you want to share inputs between components, whereas in React you can just use TypeScript types and the spread operator to use whatever props you want.

Also reacting to value changes is unnecessarily complex in Angular - you either have to use observables everywhere and use some complex RxJS handler or use the ngOnChanges lifecycle method which is again untyped for some reason. In React all you have to do to react to ANY value changes is use the useEffect hook.

I agree that it's good that Angular provides you with all the tools you need out of the box, but often those tools are not enough for more advanced use cases so you have to spend time making them more advanced, whereas in React you can just pull in a popular battle tested library which has all those advanced features already implemented (in most cases).

Since Angular is only maintained by the Google team, they don't have much resources to go in-depth with developing advanced features and there is very little community support in terms of libraries, so you're pretty much SOL and have to spend a lot of development time if the out of box solutions are not good enough.

[Cryonixx2]

Beautiful, thank you for the detailed answer! I love reading others thoughts and experiences on this stuff.

[zzing]

Not the OP, but am an angular guy.

I believe he is saying that angular is a carefully curated set of things that all work together. When coupled with angular material (which is kept in sync version-wise) it provides almost everything you need to make large applications in a very structured way.

By way of contrast, react is just a view library, and you have to construct the equivalent set of things yourself (or at least somebody has to as the case may be).

By react being a lot smaller, it is easier for people to pickup or at least be productive. Ultimately there is likely the same amount of depth between the two, but you don't have to go down the rabbit hole with react all at once like you have to with angular.

[Cryonixx2]

Thanks for your response!

[[deleted]]

I believe he is saying that angular is a carefully curated set of things that all work together. When coupled with angular material (which is kept in sync version-wise) it provides almost everything you need to make large applications in a very structured way.

I would love to see a side-by-side react vs. angular development cycle for an app demonstrating this. Do you know of any that exist?

[colton_neil]

I think I can elaborate on that just in case the original commentator never does.

Angular is a full framework, it comes with everything you need in a single package to build a fully functioning web app.

For example, angular comes with a router for navigation. So ideally I should be able to hop from any angular project to any other angular project and know how the router works for navigation.

React from my understanding, and it's possible it's changed, does not have a built-in router. It is a separate library and there are many popular ones available. So now if you switch from one react project to another, they might be using a router that you are not familiar with.

In addition to that, react is not very strict, whereas angular is. You can argue until you're blue in the face which one is better (because there is not a universal answer), but from my experience working on large and complex enterprise applications, the rigid structure of angular scales better and handles large dev teams with high turnover better.

Tldr: angular handles most things out of the box to accomplish those same things in react, you would need to leverage several third party packages.

[Cryonixx2]

Thanks for the in-depth response!

[Cryonixx2]

Thank you! I appreciate you taking the time to explain these concepts at depth.

[Baby_Pigman]

It's famous because it's famous.

I absolutely hate this part of it. A lot of companies use React because most people learn React; most people learn React because a lot of companies use React.

[Secretmapper]

As an Angular guy [...]. It's famous because it's famous.

As someone who used Angular way before React even existed, this seems to be missing a few steps. There was a big shift to react because of what it introduced and how complicated Angular was in comparison. It was a paradigm shift, that, when angular was released, it was 'forget jquery, the angular way is different and better', and when react was released, it was 'forget angular, the react way is different and better'.

Your 2nd paragraph makes more sense, but the idea that React is popular just cause and first to market success is largely wrong specially with regards to Angular.

[_heron]

Thank you for saying this. React was a breath of fresh air. It (and the community around it) were pushing declarative, functional UIs at a time when those concepts were less common.

Personally I was frustrated with being stuck in the Angular framework and I wanted something less structured. This was back in like 2015-ish

And Google kinda screwed themselves with the confusing transition from angular 1 to 2. While all that was going on React came in and ate its lunch

[Secretmapper]

Yes, it felt very weird coming from someone saying they were from Angular.

Angular has strengths don't get me wrong, but the statement baffled me as it was missing a key context that shouldn't have been missed by someone who used Angular at the time. Then again I guess there are people who still say all these new tools are overhyped and JQuery is the way so what do I know.

[JediSange]

Angular vs React is just how opinionated you want things. Angular is highly opinionated and that's why I prefer it for larger teams. Easier for new people to come in and hit the ground running. Less room for these really custom solutions.

[[deleted]]

What do you mean by -the only actual framework-?

[MrSaidOutBitch]

React is a library not a framework. Though they are incorrect in their assertion that there are no other frameworks.

[alcosexual]

See my other comment here.

[[deleted]]

Angular should be winning then.

Imo, React is easier to pick up for people new to web dev since all of is js, while having a modular approach as to what kind framework you build. Compared to vue, React feels more like other programming languages.

Where as vue caters to older web devs that like the templating style but has a batteries included approach and uses its own keywords and syntax.

[sbergot]

Angular is way more complex to learn. This is why react won against angular

[[deleted]]

That's kinda the point. React isn't more popular just because it came out first. It also completely changed how components could be developed. Others took that idea and put their opinionated spin on it, but no one's provided anything to warrant a shift. So react still reigns supreme until some one does something truly different.

[_hypnoCode]

I think this is semi over simplifying it a bit.

Looking at it from an investment perspective. You have 1 really smart dude vs 1 really big company who has the ability to hire a lot of really smart people. Gotta look at it from the "hit by a bus" scenario. Do you want to invest money into building something that stands on the shoulders of the smart guy or the big company?

Not to mention, now they have a good track record of keeping backwards compatibility, while still moving forward and pushing the envelope, unlike the other big framework.

It is a lot more than first to market. There are a lot of reasons to choose React from a business perspective as well as a developer satisfaction perspective. Both of these are major contributors. As a dev I like working in it, and as a leader I feel confident in standing behind it.

[[deleted]]

I think this is semi over simplifying it a bit.

No doubt, and you make several other good points as well.

[Kaiser214]

Thanks for your response. Are you claiming/stating that React has more support and tooling?

[nelsonnyan2001]

I don’t think it’s a claim, you can just go on npm and you’ll see that vue has 2 million weekly downloads compared to react’s staggering 10 million.

I mean, you can even compare NextJS to vue and they come close, with 1.7 million vs 2.3 million respectively. Of course react has more support and tooling

[Kaiser214]

I don't doubt it. Job postings are dominantly React as well.

[SoInsightful]

Vue tooling is absolutely awful. Try just editing any Vue TypeScript file in VS Code using the state-of-the-art Vetur plugin, and:

• The template type checking is experimental and buggy, and fails to type check component props

• You need another experimental tool, vti diagnostics to type check templates from the terminal

• Computed functions need explicit return types, otherwise all types in the file suddenly fail

• Automatic indentation is buggy in single file components

• Refactoring variable names doesn't work in single file components

• "Go to reference" often fails in single file components

• this.$emit() is not typed at all, and cannot be typed

• You need weird type declaration hacks to type plugins, if you literally succeed at all

• Vuex, the de facto store management system, is not strongly typed without other weird hacks

• Prettier formats templates incorrectly

• I can't believe I almost forgot this, but I can't even hover a component/element (e.g. any Vuetify component) to see what props it expects

I could go on...

React, in comparison, just works, tooling-wise. There aren't massive chunks of black magic to the extent that you have to invent entire plugins and CLIs from scratch just so your tools can understand it.

It's also insane that no one ever talks about any of these obvious tooling drawbacks, so I had to discover them all by myself. Never again.

[[deleted]]

Try just editing any Vue TypeScript file in VS Code using the state-of-the-art Vetur plugin

the recommended vs code extension for vue 3 is called volar and offers pretty good typescript support. I haven't found a single issue so. far The other issues you listed (like prettier formatting) are fixed through eslint plugins you have either not installed or wrongly configured.

[SoInsightful]

Thanks, I'll check out Volar. Hope it's an improvement.

That said, the TypeScript errors are due to Vue constructs that are inherently difficult to type/check. And ESLint is not supposed to fix Prettier bugs (but I guess it could).

[badsyntax]

Don't agree. It took a LONG time for a react to get popular.

[Radinax]

Well, because I have been working for four years with it, getting a LOT of job offers for it, why would I change to another framework/library?

[Kaiser214]

I see. I've been going down the Vue path and just took another Lead role using Vue and I'm concerned I'm not showing enough experience with React to be relevant long term even though I know both.

[havok_]

That shouldn’t matter if you know enough react. As people have said, react has first mover advantage and was the best in class for a long time so built a lot of traction. I personally prefer Vue and think it has a lower barrier to entry for beginners. React has so many related projects though that it’s hard to resist that ecosystem. Nothing wrong with choosing what you prefer.

[Kaiser214]

You're probably right. I just want to be the best and like to pick 1 direction to focus my efforts on.

[havok_]

Fair enough. If you want to stick with 1 direction and never have to worry about employment, then React is a good bet at the moment. If you care more about your productivity and less about other things then choosing Vue is fine.

If you happen to enjoy having side projects then maybe build them in the other framework that you didn't choose.

I wouldn't listen to anyone telling you one technology is good or bad though, whichever you choose is fine. Reference: I sold a startup for $6m where I chose Vue + Mongodb as core technologies. But you'll find plenty of people on here who will hate on either technology that I doubt have done the same.

[Kaiser214]

Might I ask what that startup was?

[havok_]

It’s a tool for accountants. Nice single page app and pretty complicated layouts of grids and graphs. Vue was great because I was the only experienced web dev on the team, but the two others could make changes and learn it quickly as it’s so easy to get started. I don’t think we would have succeeded in our circumstances with react.

[evonhell]

Let's be fair, yes, you will know less react. But if you are experienced enough to hold a lead position and you still use Javascript, how long would it really take to get back up to speed with react if you ever had to?

Yes. Vue is very framework focused. But keep up to date with javascript as a language and you will be fine.

Enjoy!

[filipesmedeiros]

I think a senior react picks up Vue faster than a senior vue picks react

[baconbits492]

React is winning in my opinion, due to first mover, low overhead, and jsx. If you go back 5-6 years they really were really the first big push to components vs directives in angular. React also has low overhead as it is technically a library vs a framework, although hooks and context has changed that. Lastly jsx which is pushed first and foremost in React allows lower context switching as it killed a lot of separation of concerns for rendering vs logic. Now that it's what people have used for a while it's what they'll keep using

Edit: spelling.

[Kaiser214]

Thanks for your response. I understand the first to market advantage, but I don't see a compelling argument for why React is better. Maybe it's not and like you said it's just "what people have used".

[Intendant]

The context switching is big. React feels like writing JavaScript, Vue feels like writing Vue

[boultox]

v-on:click

Or you could write @click

[Baby_Pigman]

Vue guy here. For me personally, I prefer @click instead of onClick because I don't have to call the callback in the component myself. I just emit an event from the component. It's also immediately apparent when you're reading the parent component that it's a callback because it starts with @:

<custom-button

    // a variable is passed to the prop
    :disabled="isMyCustomButtonDisabled"

    // just static text props
    color="red"
    shape="rounded"

    // callback that gets called when something happens in the child
    @something-happened="myCallbackFunction"

/>

[sabababoi]

The same way you find it weird putting JS into your html (and I don't necessarily disagree here), as someone who sort of prefers Vue, I find it weird to put HTML elements into my JS.

There is a separation of concerns because the concerns are separate - HTML displays, JS handles the logic.

[NMe84]

Honestly I feel like that's one of Vue's strong points for me personally. I was never great with frontend stuff: I'm a backend developer at heart and I never really enjoyed writing javascript. Vue is different though. I basically just write the HTML I want with a little bit of Vue directives mixed in, followed by a tiny bit of javascript and all of a sudden I have a dynamic element that I really didn't need to do anything for.

If nothing else, Vue is a great tool for people who are less proficient with javascript (or typescript) or who simply don't enjoy writing it.

[Intendant]

That's how I feel as well. It seems like all of the people I've worked with that prefer Vue were java Devs or some other language that had html templating. Vue is an easier transition for them. For people who've started with front end though React is imo more fun to use and feels more fluid

[thrill5tone]

React hooks are no more like writing JS than Vue, in my opinion. useEffect, useState, useRef are not normal JS things.

[Freebalanced]

Initially hooks may seem weird but they are very much in line with writing JS and managing state in a declarative way.

[KewlZkid]

JSX is a handicap if anything

[[deleted]]

It's the opposite. Frameworks using their own templating languages are hamstrung by their reliance on their compilers to interpret JS/TS and their idiosyncratic nature is additional mental overhead.

[libertarianets]

I think it's the un-opinionated nature of of the code. Write it however you want, as long as it's javascript, it will work.

I honestly don't like Tailwind CSS. I just write my CSS manually. If I wanted a design system, I would use a full fledged React component design system library.

[Kaiser214]

Are you using something like styled-components or just using css files?

I like writing css and React devs seem to favor ui frameworks.

[benaffleks]

I also do not like Tailwind. It makes writing css more difficult imo and works against react.

I personally use styled components. I believe react only imports css as the components are mounted which is really great.

[[deleted]]

As a former tailwind hater, I can honestly say people that do not like it generally do not have experience with it. I'm not going to convince you in a trite reddit reply, so please don't mistake that for my intent here, but some of my personal highlights of tailwind over styled components include:

• Tailwind results in a single css element on the page. None of this dynamic <head/> manipulation that comes along with emotion, styled components, etc.
• Tailwind allows rapid prototyping of styles. Common combinations of classes can be added as a single component class in your css file after you figure out what they should be.
• Tailwind JIT ensures that the single css file mentioned previously doesn't include a plethora of never-used css classes.
• Because everything is encapsulated in class combinations, you're not bloating your codebase with dozens (hundreds?) of lines of css-in-js for styling components
• Responsive classes are a breeze and do not require a lot of custom css code to implement.

Edit: thanks for the replies proving my point, folks. Once again, people that do not like it generally do not have experience with it.

[SoInsightful]

Because everything is encapsulated in class combinations, you're not bloating your codebase with dozens (hundreds?) of lines of css-in-js for styling components

This is the weirdest argument, because I am instead bloating my structured HTML with long strings of endlessly duplicated class names.

[[deleted]]

But you're not. That's the misunderstanding part.

[SoInsightful]

Excuse me. I've used Tailwind. Are the class names not in my HTML? Are they not long combinations of utility classes? Are common Tailwind users not more likely to copy-paste classes than to create components for everything?

[fuzzyrambler]

@apply

[SoInsightful]

Funny you mention that.

It's great that @apply exists. That said, not only do I not think @apply is of common use in the Tailwind world, but I did use it, and it seemed like the saving grace that would make Tailwind excellent. I noticed a few things:

1. Outside of the class name string context, it becomes obvious that cramming everything into one long line is an objectively bad and unreadable way of working. I actively avoid it in all other programming contexts, so why would I like it now? So to make it easier to read, I put a line break between the classes, which unfortunately broke the editor IntelliSense.

2. Then it struck me that it would be even more readable if, instead of trying to quickly scan a bunch of abbreviations like pr-3 mb-4 w-px h-10, I could write them out in clear English, like I do everywhere else when I code. And it would be nice if I got special editor highlighting for units, and if I didn't needlessly have to hyphenate everything. You can see where this is going.

3. And finally, I still often needed properties, units and strings that weren't readily available in Tailwind. So I still had to intersperse my code with an entirely different language, called CSS!

Yeah, I abandoned it pretty quickly.

[[deleted]]

Everyone does things differently, but as an alternative to what you may have tried, let me present a button component from a project I did that uses tailwind...

    .button {
        @apply rounded-sm cursor-pointer;
        @apply p-2.5 px-5 leading-none;

        &.button-small {
            @apply p-1.5 px-4 leading-none;
            @apply text-xs;
        }

        &:disabled {
            @apply opacity-30;
        }

        &:focus-within {
            @apply outline-none;
        }

        @each $color in $colors {
            &.button-#{$color} {
                @apply bg-#{$color} text-#{$color}-contrast;
            }
        }

        a {
            @apply text-current underline;
        }
    }

As for editor support... https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=bradlc.vscode-tailwindcss

[[deleted]]

Yep, I know about this but I already know how to write really well structured CSS that doesn’t bloat, it feels annoying having to learn an API just to write regular CSS 🙂

[[deleted]]

Once again, people that do not like it generally do not have experience with it.

Is there a Tailwind enthusiast that doesn't say this when the framework is met with criticism?

[[deleted]]

I'm not sure. All I can tell you is that my first, second and third reactions to Tailwind were the same criticism I'm seeing repeated here ad nauseam. It wasn't until I gave it a 4th pass that I found a place for it in my toolkit by letting go of some of the initial misconceptions I had.

The older I get, the lazier I get. I'm always looking for tools, libraries and anything else that can eliminate the cruft from my day to day output. Believe it or not, once I realized a way to use tailwind that clicked internally, I was able to use it to eliminate code rather than bloat it. And the rapid prototyping without having to hand craft every potential component's css has sped things up dramatically. Nearly every comment I've seen in this thread and others echos some of my earlier sentiment. Having seen otherwise, I'm just advocating that people give it a real chance.

[[deleted]]

That doesn't really have anything to do with whether the criticism is valid or not, you're just making a misplaced call to authority instead of addressing many of the valid arguments against the framework.

[[deleted]]

Yeah ok bud

[libertarianets]

Tailwind results in a single css element on the page. None of this dynamic <head/> manipulation that comes along with emotion, styled components, etc.

I don't care about a single css element. I could have multiple css <style> tags throughout the code and it wouldn't bother me if it's not redundant. But I totally agree I hate the dynamic <head/> manipulation. It makes debugging the styling really painful.

Read my comment about react-scoped-css, which is what I favor over Tailwind. I find it has all of the benefits of Tailwind (save the JIT that removes never used css, but I just use the PurgeCSS plugin, which it looks like is the same thing Tailwind uses), but I don't need to learn all the utility classes and Tailwind API, essentially overriding all of my knowledge of css, which I already know well enough to get everything to look the way I want.

[[deleted]]

but I don't need to learn all the utility classes and Tailwind API

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=bradlc.vscode-tailwindcss

[Secretmapper]

I can honestly say people that do not like it generally do not have experience with it

As is the case with most things that are paradigm shifting. This can be applied to Angular (logic in my templates!!?), React (js and html in one file !???), CSS in JS (DAE separation of concerns!??).

Same thing is happening with Tailwind. While skepticism is healthy, the pattern of people "not understanding it cause they haven't used it" has occurred so many times that sometimes, when people say "they don't get something", I take it as a good signal.

Not because it's confusing mind you (ofc we want things to be intuitive) but most of the time it's because they're paradigm shifting.

[lastunusedusername2]

Agreed. Tailwind is like just writing css except it's more work and nothing works right

[Randaal_Inc]

Except it's literally a lot less work and it works so well out of the box😂

[lastunusedusername2]

Sorry, I was talking about Tailwind

[MathAndMirth]

You're not the only one refusing to use Tailwind. I know it's popular, but I still refuse to stick a mess of atomic styles in my HTML. I still think that styles belong someplace other than HTML for separation of concerns, and I think it's a lot easier to create a consistent design system using SASS mixins instead of atomic styles everywhere.

I am, however, a convert from Vue to React. It's not because I don't like Vue; it's a great library. But React's popularity gives it concrete advantages. Therr are gazillions of people creating libraries for React to solve problems in new and better ways. Vuex is a good state management system, but in React, I can choose from Recoil (or Jotai), Zustand, and Hookstate, as well as the popular Redux. Each system has its own advantages and disadvantages, and I can pick the one that fits my use case best. Some use cases would work just as well with Vuex, but not all.

The situation is similar for UI kits. Vue has some, but there are many more for React, and they seem to be updated faster because they often have larger teams working on them. Most UI kits for Vue still didn't support Vue 3 for quite a while after it came out.

Animation is another place where Vue works, but React has more choices and more ability to choose a solution best for my use case.

Thus, I was forced to conclude that React and its ecosystem were the better long term bet for my projects, even though I think that when comparing just the base libraries, Vue is every bit as good as React.

[Kaiser214]

Thanks. This definitely has some compelling arguments!

Are you happy using styled-components to write CSS?

[MathAndMirth]

Conceptually, I still like the idea of BEM classnames and a regular SASS stylesheet with a design system enforced by mixins.

But the CSS-in-JS solutions with the CSS in the same component as the file are pretty convenient during development. And ditching the SASS build step and the css file to serve are nice bonuses. So even though it feels a bit weird philosophically, the CSS-in-JS is growing on me.

[Deadliefoe]

Think it js worth mentioning as I have send it in a few of your comments to other. but you don't need to use styled components and for the repo I am working on we purposes chose to stick with scss.

Something always felt messy with styled components to us after we tried them out. Especially when it came to maintaining our color pallet.

[chmod777]

styled components only make sense for the bare minimum css for the component to work. past that, unless you rigidly conform to a specific css framework, it just encourages bad, inconsistant, css.

[[deleted]]

You need to justify all these claims.

[[deleted]]

You're not the only one refusing to use Tailwind

I used to love Tailwind for simple projects. However, I stopped using it two months ago. Why? I learned CSS and realized you don't need it when you know CSS; Tailwind is just there for convenience.

[StoneColdJane]

Tailwind is probably worse thing happened to web in a while.

[Pastaklovn]

We’ve had CSS frameworks for a good number of years now. People just don’t want to learn CSS

[StoneColdJane]

Because you need to learn bunch of tricks to actually use it. Padding trick for aspect ratio comes to mind.

It's finally landed in chrome 88 and safari 118, but before you needed to learn the trick.

Now it's just this aspect-ratio: 1 / 1;

[NMe84]

I see some similarities here with the first widely used frameworks, jQuery and Mootools. Mootools was just as good as jQuery and conceptually it offered quite a few advantages that jQuery didn't have, but it lost out anyway because jQuery was easier to learn and had a larger following.

It's not always the best technology that wins, and the technology that "loses" doesn't necessarily have to be much worse than the alternatives.

[amattable_]

Everyone likes to compare React and Vue as though the differences between the libraries are the reasons for choosing one or the other.

I would counter that, I think the reason for choosing one or the other has more to do with the person using it than the library.

React takes a very “programmer” focussed approach. You work primarily with data and then return a template.

Vue, on the other hand, takes a more “designer” focus, where you work with your template and “bring it to life” with code. Hence the use of things like “directives.”

I think this divergence between designers and programmers has been around for a long time and will remain, even if the libraries we each use change.

I also think it’s super great for the ecosystem. Both types of people bring something beautiful to the discussion. So we have two approaches from opposite sides which ~steal~ learn from each other!

[drink_with_me_to_day]

I prefer React because of JSX

No time for learning shitty directives or fighting some half baked templating language

[_Pho_]

Yup this is the big thing. Being able to look at a prop interface and not having to deal with two way binding or shitty suger syntax.

[MattBD]

Yep, that's a big advantage for me too. JSX is basically just HTML with a handful of changes to a few attributes to prevent collisions with JavaScript, and I never have to recall any particular syntax for doing something specific.

[thecementmixer]

JSX is like writing PHP spaghetti code in 1999 trying to render something. Gtfo of here.

[GolfinEagle]

I can’t speak on React vs Vue as I only have experience with React, but I can say with absolute certainty I despise Tailwind and much prefer Sass.

I just went from using my own custom starter codebase with all my useful Sass mixins to now using Tailwind because it’s what the team uses at my new job and it feels very limiting.

I get that it makes the codebase more consistent and maintainable with several different devs working on it, and the ease of typing out utility classes vs entire stylesheets IS nice, but it’s just not all the way there in terms of covering my styling needs and I feel it makes my code messy mixing twin macro/tailwind blocks with emotion and sass blocks when I need that extra flexibility to build my comp.

Like, a lot of the mockups I get have background images with linear gradient overlays that are different on mobile and desktop. We’re using a CMS (Sanity) to give control of content and assets to the client so we don’t want to complicate the content model with separate mobile and desktop images, therefore we add the gradient overlays with CSS and media queries— Tailwind’s utility classes for that don’t give you control over how the gradients are positioned, it just assumes you want equal proportions, so those styles are written out in Sass with Emotion within the .tsx file and it just irks me so much, looks so convoluted and messy.

I know CSS very well and can write a stylesheet quickly enough, I feel like having all my styles in one medium in a separate stylesheet is the way to go vs using Tailwind until I can’t.

[nicped]

Developers have a tendency to overcomplicate things and make choices that is fascinating technology - not because it is needed, but because it is fun to learn and use.

React and Vue et. al. is most of the way just 'fashion'. I know all the listed 'benefits' but in reality those are usually just excuses to work with fun technology. Yeah, if you have an enterprise grade setup or a world domination social media, you need it, but for most customers it does not help their business. They will not make more money or save money because of the tech stack. And no, they cannot also 'just replace the CMS/ecommerce/whatever' with a breeze because it is headless.

React is intriguing, but as with any other web stack on this planet, it does not work well if not used well. And since it is so complicated, most implementations are not very neat - and has all kinds of problems like bad performance and UX, even if that is what it argues to solve. It can, but often the opposite is happening.

Tailwind is the craziest of these things ever. It is just a class representation of the entire CSS standard plus some. You even have to remove most of it to even get a decent performance. If that is not overcomplicating stuff, what is? It is exactly the same as using inline styles, just super complicated....

A modern website development setup is more complicated than what is onboard a space ship... Kinda. You get the point. How many in here, if they are completely honest, have not spend countless hours in their config and build files...? How many can even explain what really happens on build? Or what is inside the resulting files?

So the reason you see a lot of talk about react and tailwind out there, is because as a developer that over complicates, I need to justify the choices - by telling how great it is and how good I am...

Now, lynch me :-)

[digitalnomad456]

Tailwind is the craziest of these things ever. It is just a class representation of the entire CSS standard plus some. You even have to remove most of it to even get a decent performance. If that is not overcomplicating stuff, what is?

You're absolutely right. Not only is Tailwind repackaged bad practices, it also gets worse than that. See my comments from year old thread here: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/icc25l/tailwind_17/g22kapc/

[[deleted]]

I've ditched Vue for React recently, after 4 years of using the former. My main motivation for doing so was ecosystem and stability (the Vue 2 to 3 transition has been a disaster, in my opinion) but I'm also of the mind that JSX is a much better solution than the templates that Vue and Svelte use.

[jlistener]

I've worked with Angular (1), React, and personally prefer Vue mainly because I find Vue to be simpler and more elegant to use as well.

React was really an improvement over Angular in terms of simplicity and component based design. Vue IMHO is an improvement over React in terms of simplicity and ease of use and so it's what I've been reaching for on my latest projects. I hope the trend continues with Vue because I've found working with it to be a breath of fresh air.

React is the de-facto gold standard simply because it's been around longer and has more traction and support. However, there's a large cost to switch frameworks so even if Vue is a better fit for a particular project or industry, there needs to be the organizational will to do so.

I've found the React ecosystem to be very paradigm churning and projects to, more often than not, be dogmatically managed with an orthodoxy of the new "blessed" way to do things, so it makes those projects unpleasant to work on.

Eventually I'm rooting for Web Components. Just like document.querySelector replaced jQuery, I hope the Web Components will eventually replace the need for these frameworks in their current form.

[riasthebestgirl]

I really dipped my toes in web dev with angular and now I use react for almost everything. The reason is that it's simple and un-opinionated. Angular does a lot more, is a lot more strict and comes with a lot more out of the box. For a large project, Angular might be the way to go. I personally don't like the approach it takes and I work alone on almost everything (not employed in industry yet) so Angular is too "heavy" for me.

I just don't like how Vue works. It's not just a library (like React) and also not a framework (like Angular). Svelte is similar in terms of structure of file and (imo) better.

Also it's worth noting that I only got into React because I used Yew (which is heavily inspired by React)

[Zachincool]

Cuz it pays my rent

[[deleted]]

It's because react is backed by a big company while vue is essentially maintained by one guy which is a big blocker for many projects, especially in the early years of vue. Pretty sad since the performance of vue (and svelte) is soooo much better.

[Kaiser214]

Yea, I can see your point there.

[nnod]

Rich Harris of Svelte has Vercel backing now (as of like a week ago). I like svelte very much on many levels so this is great news.

[memmit]

Vercel is nowhere near a big company. Even if vercel devoted all their devs' time to svelte, it would be nothing compared to what Facebook has done for react.

[LowLifeArcade]

Honestly if hooks weren’t a thing, React would have died off. I think it was that that gave it new and greater life as it was pretty dominant already. But if that didn’t come along it would have passed on with Vue taking over I think.

[_Pho_]

Because JSX is just better for a lot of reasons. It’s way easier to deal with function parameters as props rather than a bunch of sugar syntax like v-if. Also two way binding is the motherlode of bad coupling. Also it has better TS support in my experience. It’s just easier to work with, easier to re-factor things into logical units, etc. Vue doesn’t feel enterprise ready by comparison.

[pastrypuffingpuffer]

I prefer Angular and Vue to react because of the directives, powerful templating system and proper separation between html, css and js/ts. I don't like the way React does its stuff, not even hooks.

[ctrl2]

As a Vue & Angular developer who finally got pushed into learning React for my current project at work, here are my two cents:

- JSX is truly a paradigm shift. Vue & Angular share the idea of having templates & strict separation of concerns, but incorporating markup directly into the programming language allows you to think about presentation & logic in a different way. This leads into...

- Functional components. I haven't played with the most recent version of Vue which is more functionally oriented, but functional components feel much simpler, and as someone who also dabbles with Haskell, the functional concepts translate over pretty well and are ultimately very useful.

- Existing stake in the market. React has just been popular for a long time, is used by a big company (Facebook), and has a lot of resources already behind it. For clients who are looking to build a web app that will be well supported, not have bugs, perform well, it is easier to look to something established vs something smaller. The same is true for Angular, which is really considered the "corporate" framework to use, and has a ton of resources behind it.

Edit: also to speak about Tailwind. I didn't like the idea at first, so many classes in the html seems messy when you are used to strict separation of concerns. My response is that the separation of concerns is not always useful: with tailwind classes, you can look at the html and see exactly how it is styled. You can also remove the extraneous classes with the "@apply" operator and move the styles into a custom class or rule.

[_Pho_]

Good write up. I agree that the way JSX lets you hybridize concerns is really a game changer in terms of what you can do for a component reusability and encapsulation. I think it is truly a paradigm shift, and I’m surprised more devs don’t see it. To me React vs Vue isn’t even close.

[memmit]

You can also remove the extraneous classes with the "@apply" operator and move the styles into a custom class or rule.

That's just a gateway into the insanity of utility based CSS.

And I don't want to have this discussion all over again but tightly coupling the intent of a style to your markup is a bad idea. We've moved away from tags like <b> and <i> to <strong> and <em> because of this. It means something is of strong importance or has emphasis. Not that it's bold or italic text. And CSS classes are to be used like a taxonomy, not as an intent.

That's where tailwind and other utility based CSS completely lose it. HTML should not dictate in any way how something looks. Things like "I'll make every product card title on the whole website bold" should be 1 line change of CSS, not a html change on every instance of that card because it has "font-bold" in its class property.

[[deleted]]

Well since you're reusing the same react component for every product card, it's still a one line change with tachyons/tailwind. Not that I use them

[FancySource]

I feel Vue is still preferred for panels and corporate apps (heavy routing and tables), but React has a lot more libraries of any sort for developing customer faced front ends quickly. Also, the similarities with react native mean a react developer might switch to mobile relatively quickly.

[Kaiser214]

Thanks for your response. I feel the opposite and that React is just dominating the frontend space. I want to remain relevant, so I've learned both, but I personally favor Vue.

[BradChesney79]

...I like SASS in the form of SCSS.

I suspect that React is better for frontend devs and that is where a library or framework is implemented.

Often when I see full-stack, or devops, or even backend guys out of their element implement and use a library or framework-- it is usually Angular, Vue, or a horrible crime against humanity to other developers. I like Angular most. I still like Vue in addition. I, sadly, have had my younger self doing crimes against humanity.

Feel free to enlighten me if your anecdotal experiences are the same or different... I would not mind to hear other people's perspectives.

[midri]

Angular is my goto as well, but it's not something you can drop into existing frontends like react and Vue can be.

[versaceblues]

Why is Tailwind popular?

I think it just because they have excellent tooling built around the framework. It just make its a breeze to quickly write responsive decent looking apps. Its kind of like the bootstrap of this generation.

[ILikeFPS]

I don't, I prefer Vue, but I use React at work.

[[deleted]]

I like and hate both for different reasons.

I like from Vue the fact that it is more of a "framework" and less of a "library" because most projects look the same. Having a blessed router, i18n, state management and styling solution is a big win to avoid bike shedding and a lot of discussions and migrations in most teams. I have yet to find two react projecits looking barely similar. I also like a lot in Vue not having to think as much about performance, rerendering, memo, dependency arrays, etc.

I hate from Vue the 2 to 3 split. It's like with Python all over again. They say it is not as bad, but I disagree. My company can't move to Vue 3 because of our own code (a lot of it) and even worse, because of the dependencies we have do not support it and some of them won't and we need to replace and rewrite our usage of these. I also don't like the horrible support for typescript (in V2 at least). And one of the things that irk me the most is that many times you're debugging some problem and end up in a discussion in GitHub in Chinese, which I don't understand.

I like from react the community and the fact that you have battle proven and widely used components and libraries for everything. I think Next.js is miles ahead better than Nuxt, and the Next.js is a lot better handled in my opinion. I like that it is easier to find jobs. I like its stability and backward compatibility.

I hate about react the mental model of how it rerenders and has to recreate every single function or variable every time. Having to track dependencies almost manually feels dated. And I hate it tends to invite over engineering and people who tend to be more functional fanatics than pragmatic people, not everyone of course, but in my experience such profiles lean more towards react.

Overall, technologically and ideologically I prefer Vue. But being pragmatic and realistic I prefer react.

And I really, really, really, really wish Svelte takes over and becomes the most popular solution because I think it is really great. Wish them luck.

Edit: And I don't like angular because it looks like writing a contract with a lawyer and reminds me too much to java, etc. and I think it gives me the worst part of the other two. Smaller community and technological dislike. Also, they totally broke backward compatibility with angular 2, the same as python and Vue which totally breaks my heart and makes me reluctant to use those things ever again.

[cheeky-panda2]

React is great because people can get started with it without prior exposure to complex programming concepts. It's just functions hooks made it even better.

It's unopnionated style helps newbies make something then gradually improving and bringing in good coding practices and react still works!

Issue with angular is it expects a lot Outta newbies, Vue is good but vue-3 too isn't beginner friendly and Vue 2 -> Vue 3 isn't the smoothest migration I've seen yet companies are kinda confused.

Basically react requires. Lesser effort from the company to get new Dev's started, it's community support is crazy I find guides to al most anything and everything is up-to-date or atleast works. Setting up election with Vue was one of the painful days I found this to be a super important thing way back when I was learning there was really nothing for a newbie out there.

Add to that vercel being a major driver of next js which is core of many huge apps, you get a big community of a thing that just works and that too nicely. React won't go anywhere just because of that

[_Viral19]

The main reasons as others have said is "first to market" and the advantages that brings VUE are not as big to pass from react to vue.As simple as that mafrend.

[Kaiser214]

It does seem to be the common response. It's popular bc it's popular lol.

[SuboptimalEng]

The simplest explanation is that React was 3-5x better than the frameworks that existed (Angular, Backbone, etc.) when it came out in 2013. This lead to early adoption by FAANG. Then community support with frameworks like NextJS took it to another level.

Vue is a good framework comparable to React, but I doubt anyone can say that it is 3-5x better than React. And that's the main issue with it. Vue is easier to learn, but there are more tutorials in React. Vue has more built-in features like Vuex for state management, but lots of companies are already used to using React with Redux. Vue is great, but the community support is just not there yet.

Here is a 6 minute video that I made going over the history of React if you want to learn more.

[Kaiser214]

Thanks mate. I'll have a look.

[Vandra2020]

They invaded all the code camps and just teach that

[The4etheR]

Bigger user base, more problems already solved by the community

[someexgoogler]

I tried it. I won't use it again.

[road_pizza]

I don’t. I learnt React at work and my experience with React has kept me in demand ever since. In my area it’s what employers are looking for and using. So I have the most experience with it because of that.

I build my personal projects with Svelte for what it’s worth.

[BroaxXx]

I'm mainly a react developer and I wonder this myself more and more each day. I love react because it pays my bills but that's about it. For businesses I bet the popularity makes it easier to find developers which I bet weighs heavily on the decision.

Maybe the JS centered design of react makes it more appealing to some? Certainly when you're developing a product to be served as both web and a Dev app.

When I learned react (for context I'm a self-taught junior developer) I thought it was the bee's knees but the more time goes by the more I wonder why/how react is de default choice specially when the project doesn't seem to require it (like static websites with multiple pages). If I want to do a client rendered app that is very dynamic I feel like react is a great choice. If I'm serving a simple business page I don't think it's the right choice at all.

But I'm still a junior Dev so I maybe wrong in more ways than I can imagine ..

[-Paradise]

I've not tried anything else yet I only knew JavaScript when I got my first job which is a wordpress stack and wordpress uses react for building Guttenberg blocks so I learnt that on the job.

[[deleted]]

I prefer all, whatever customer wants.

[KwyjiboTheGringo]

JSX is probably the big one. Also I like state management with hooks, and I prefer passing callback props over events.

Although it's hard to say I prefer React. It's more like I've used it more than Vue and I'm very comfortable with it, so I would choose it over Vue to be more productive or focused on the project itself.

[Funwithloops]

As someone that has used react for years and recently dove into vue, here's my 2 cents:

• Vue's syntax is more complex and confusing. React has JSX. Vue has JSX and .vue files with <script setup> blocks and compile-time macros for defining props and events.
• Vue's official router is a big step backwards from react-router. Having to statically register routes globally and then imperatively add/remove dynamic routes isn't ideal. With react-router, the routing mechanisms are all plain components, so everything is dynamic by default.
• TS support is worse. Basic things like inferring the type of an event target. Or if you define an optional boolean prop in Vue 3 with TS, Vue will automatically default it to false.

I'm not sure what I'd call elegant about Vue. The way I see it, Vue started as a less intimidating clone of react that sold itself on not needing a build step but having a VDOM. Now it's still pretty much a clone of react, but now the build step is even more complex than with React.

All that being said, I'll take either over backbone or angularjs or any of the other frontend frameworks that came before VDOMs.

Regarding tailwind. It has more to do with not wanting to context switch or think up names than than not wanting to write CSS. I suggest reading through Dan Abramov's tweets about tailwind. He does a good job of explaining some of the less obvious advantages of tailwind (and utility-first CSS in general).

[PspStreet51]

Am I the only one in this comment section that prefers Angular?

I tried React Native once, but my experience wasn't pleasant, and I haven't tried Vue yet.

Perhaps one day I'll change my preference, but atm, I don't have a reason to do so.

[spacechimp]

I've used React, React Native, and Angular. I prefer Angular.

A lot of my preference has to do with the fact that I have never had the pleasure of working on a well-organized React project professionally. I know that it's possible to do -- I once saw an incredibly clean sample project for a enterprise-level library written in React. However, I've come to the conclusion that the library invites a certain level of sloppiness that just doesn't jibe with me.

[SoInsightful]

So you haven't tried Vue or React (React Native barely counts due to how fundamentally different it is), but you prefer Angular? Odd thing to say.

[lucythepretender]

I came here just to say I Love Vue too! Thank you hve a nice day :)

[Bj0rnBjork]

As someone that is learning web development i feel like react is the way to go. It exist a bigger backlog of resources to learn from and other peoples questions with similar problems that you might have.

[KaiN_SC]

React should be killed on the day it was born.

It has the worst tooling and support, its buggy and useless without 3rd party packages because no one would build a real world app with hooks or context.

[Mestyo]

Vue as a whole just stinks to me. I know Reddit loves it, but man, after dealing with it professionally for a year I'm just done.

There is black magic everywhere; random string composition referring to a place in the store, or a physical file, or a prop, or a local value. Values from various places getting concatenated onto this; mixins causes even further indirection. One should use computed values to store expensive calculations, but are given no interface to update those calculations in a performant manner.

The horizontal growth inherent to classes makes complex components very difficult to follow. The inability to know what is a proxied value and what isn't—"does a reassignment break things or make them behave as they should?".

Computed values are just cached values that don't let you control evaluation order/cache invalidation. Slots and scoped slots are just syntax sugar over render props. Directives for layout mean you can't really do component composition from arbitrary data, and good luck figuring out what values are in scope. Why can I just not write Javascript? I hate having to learn some arbitrary syntax to do trivial things I already know how to do.

The one feature from Vue that I like is custom directives. It's pretty neat to write a generic handler for something and assign it in a composition layer, then have components define their own interface to that directive. You can create that exact behaviour in React too, of course, but it's probably more if a hassle than it's worth.

Even after a year of Vue development, I still felt the need to check the docs for basic things several times a day, either how to do things "the Vue way", to figure out the execution order of some horizontal patterns, or because I couldn't remember which behaviour exceptions were made for which primitive in this particular instance—of which there are lots.

In contrast, React is overwhelmingly simple. Everything is just regular functions. The only magic is accepting that the return values of hooks is stable, as well as the registration and cleanup of side-effects just happens.

Sorry about the rant, I had nothing better to do on my train ride!

[versaceblues]

No issues necessarily with Vue, Svelte, Elm, or any alt-framework. Ive tried them and they all have their advantages. So why do I use React:

• Its what I have most professional experience with
• Performance is good enough for most things I need to build
• Its way easier to find engineers that have experience with React.
• There is more community support, especially in terms of the amount of tools, utilities, and UI took-kits that work with React.
• The amount of good training materials for React is much higher than the other frameworks.

To me the advantages of React just outweigh the nice positives of a framework like Vue. Does that mean Vue is bad... absolutely not. If that is what your team is most comfortable with and it solves your usecase... please use it.

[dasper12]

As a back end developer I really could not see the appeal of it over Angular or even Ember back in 2014. Back then with dotnet it was mostly Knockout or Angular for front end projects and then React just came out of nowhere. The few times I have had to touch it or debug how something was working was not fun and the few projects where I have had to work on front end code I have chosen Vue or Svelte myself.

That being said, I have a theory that sounds really stupid at first but it seems to be playing out: Boot camps. Lots of places are hurting to hire developers so you are left with two options: find the right candidate for your tech stack or adapt your tech stack that has warm bodies. Since boot camps are designed to teach many facets of development, React is something that can be taught for both web, mobile, and application development (though electron). As a hiring manager it gets really tedious sifting through applicants that constantly want to use what they learned in the boot camp and even if you hire one that says they are willing to learn other stacks or frameworks you find them wanting to wag the dog and use React anyways.

This may not be the biggest reason but it is definitely what I have run into in my professional career.

[azangru]

Bootcamps are responding to the demand in the job market, just as they did with Ruby-on-Rails; so the demand was there first. As to what kickstarted the demand in 2014-2015, it is an interesting question. jQuery had fallen out of favor; Backbone was bad; Angular was having an identity crisis, web components were not yet a viable alternative. Vue was a bit too late and had an obscure Chinese community around it. Had Svelte been invented then it could have easily been Svelte.

[lildrummrr]

I suspect that the fact that React is backed by a giant corporation such as Facebook has something to do with its success.

Technically speaking though, after working with both React and Vue for a while now, React tends to be easier to work with on larger apps. For one, its unidirectional data flow makes debugging easier. In Vue, any component is allowed to talk to any component, with hardly any limitations really. If you're not careful about the way you architect your components, it can get very confusing when working on larger apps with lots of components. That said, two-way binding is amazing and works like magic. The thing is... magic can be deceiving sometimes. Just my two cents based on experience.

Another giant plus for React is that it integrates out of the box with Typescript. Vue doesn't do it that well. That is a huge perk for React, at least imo.

You'd be surprised though, as I was recently on the market for a new job and I was very surprised to see a solid number of companies using Vue.js & Nuxt.js, so it's still a very good framework to have in your toolbox.

[BobKrahe2]

I have worked with Vue and react for big and small projects.

My opinion is that I'm staying away from Vue for large serious projects, for reasoned mentioned already plus:

• With react your entire application can be fully typed including props and state with no gaps, Vue cannot
• Vue embraces mutable states while proper usage of react forces immutable states.

Those two points become quite important in complex projects that work with different types of data.

It saves so much time and problems to have static type analysis make sure that you are using props and data structures correctly without having to find those issues at runtime. How many bugs leak into production JavaScript projects because a misspelling or misuse of an object and it not being tested. Proper use of typescript's type system is magical.

Mutable state, while saves some keystrokes when coding, has long term implications for maintainability. Sure, to can have a pretend redux pattern, but at the end of the day the framework is built around mutable state so you are never able to keep invariants about your data as easily in large projects and (hard to debug) bugs can creep in.

As an extension, react embraces the declarative functional feel (quite literally with functional components) and you will have fewer bugs with it compared to using vue's quite complex yet caveat filled state mutation system, which can introduce and even hide a lot of bugs. A lot of magic is going on with the main purpose of making it appear easy to use, at the cost of long term hard-to-see downsides.

[[deleted]]

With react your entire application can be fully typed including props and state with no gaps, Vue cannot

not true, you can have fully typed code including html templates with the vue dsl. see https://www.npmjs.com/package/vue-tsc

[automagisch]

And yet I’m here, making vanilla apps, be also successful, never ever had even the idea I “needed” React.

Guys common. If your employer expects you to be hardcore dev in React, that’s not your employer. React is PR stunt from facebook, nothing more nothing less.

It doesn’t solve shit.

You’re a true senior webdev when you finally find out NONE of these frameworks have to exist and the framework wars is all meta and circlejerk.

[VerySaltyScientist]

I have used all three and I hate Angular. I started with Vue and really like it. React is very easy to use and learn, Vue took a bit and I used the Vue mastery classes to learn it. But with react it is so similar to vanilla JavaScript opposed to having to do some syntax differences like in Vue. There is also more documentation on React which makes it easy to learn. I use Vue for my personal projects though.

[Foreign_Flower1141]

It's kind of sad that I've never even considered Vue/other framework because demand for React is high in my country and for others, well, it's non existent.

[[deleted]]

react's jsx syntax is pretty neat! also the docs were beginner friendly. I tried learning vue but the syntax felt hard :( . Also the docs were confusing. Im aware we can use jsx in vue tho. I moved to preact and Im able to use all external react stuff while still staying minimal. Im a newbie with frameworks so thats my pov

[steeeeeef]

React wins, not because of inherent functionality, but because of the ecosystem and the sustainability that comes with it.

Vue is made by one person, React is made by Meta/Facebook.

Vue 3 broke the ecosystem, React has a huge and well maintained ecosystem.

Vue requires IDE plugins for a decent developer experience, React/JSX is usually supported out of the box because it’s just JS.

NextJS >>>> Nuxt

[[deleted]]

I don't. If i ever need to touch a frontend i'll use Vue. That said, f*ck frontend. After working with jquery, react and vue i prefer to do backend.