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I built an app in every frontend framework

Alicia Sykes on January 05, 2026

TL;DR Which framework should you use? Well, that depends on what you're developing and your prioritie are. But I made a quick comparison...
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Dario Mannu

010000010110110001101001011000110110100101100001.com

"almost" predictable but still a cool way of spelling Alicia.com ;)

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daisy_jones_21bdcc6b40f9d profile image
Hashbyt

Great insights, Alicia! Your framework comparisons are incredibly helpful for developers navigating their options.

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joevanni_moscati_db703b94 profile image
codedumpsterfire

Not to be a negative nancy but this article is extremely fishy. First of all congrats if you actually did this but I find it very hard to believe someone actually had the time to build a real app in every framework even over 12 years. The micro ones for testing ? Sure. Secondly, the tone of the article screams AI to me. To much witty coding jokes and humor/witty comments. If English isn't your first language then I apologize! However, how does one write a huge witty article about 12 years of their life but leave in 27 spelling mistakes that I noticed right away. You didn't even edit the blog once ? Extremely fishy. I think this might be (without deep diving the code) ai generated. Just some criticism if this is real no offense 😆.

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Alicia Sykes • Edited

Nah, it's fine - i get the skeptisism.
But I can assure you, no AI. (and most the code i wrote pre-2020 / pre-chatgtp, and have just been maintaining since). But, u can check the code if u like, it is all on github github.com/lissy93/

Tone of the article is just my normal writing style. I am British, and dyslexic (not sure which one of those is a worse disability, lol).
Yeah, i know it's not very profesionally written, but I spend all day at work pretending to be profesional, so I enjoy having a break in the evenings 😅


Just to add just because i don't want to be mistaken for an AI, so some facts/stats:

  • My Code::Stats shows every character of code typed manually (all 2 million lines).
  • View any of the apps on DockerHub to see their download stats, .e.g Dashy got 10 million downloads since 2017.
  • And I make the hit counting for the hosted apps public, e.g. web check has about 10k daily users.
  • The repos show they are being used by a few real humans. Lots of my projects are on 10k+ stars (e.g. digital defense on 20k
  • And course, all the code is public, along with the last 15 years of commits.
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joevanni_moscati_db703b94 profile image
codedumpsterfire

Hey! I appreciate the very honest and real reply. You never know in todays world of AI slop. I of course don't make perfect articles or summaries either (and plenty of spelling mistakes). Congrats then thats very impressive and lots of dedication! I completely understand not caring as much about the blog as the real work. Its just like how comments and documentation are often overlooked among developers. Its true! It doesn't matter as much. But I sadly only have time to read this article. Deep diving into code would be the more proper way to handle my response but I appreciate you accepting criticism :)

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leob • Edited

Awesome overview! The "Stack Match" tool and the framework benchmarks repo are also impressive ...

"Which framework is truly the best?" - I think speaking for yourself that would definitely be Svelte?

And yeah, React is what we use because in many cases we "have to" ;-)

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Alicia Sykes

I do love me a nice bit of Svelte 😉

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Lotfi Jebali

What an experience, thanks for sharing !

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Simangaliso Vilakazi

This is awesome! I’ll be referring to this post every time I want to start building something

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The Builder

Oh wow I am super inspired. I wish you the best!

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uciharis profile image
the hengker

how do you learn that many things ? cool as hell

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Alicia Sykes

By having no life 😅

Ha ha, but if you learn properly how the browser works, and the ins and outs of JavaScript, then picking up and using a new framework isn't much more complicated than just reading the docs. Most of them are actually quite similar!

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P1

thats amazing

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Seb Hoek

This looks like a lot of work went into this comparison. Thank you very much for this! Well, and opinions can be discussed of course :-)

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Alicia Sykes

Commenting on my own post here, because I am anticipating people saying "Wait a sec mate, you've not included ____"

Unfortunately it wasn't really feasible to cover everything, and things which are either declining in usage, augment other frameworks, or take a completely different approach have been left off for brevity. Here's a summary, and my reasoning for this:

Older Frameworks

I do have to give a shoutout to these frameworks, which played their part in laying the groundwork for what we have now: Riot, Radi, Stimulus, Imba, AMP, Mithdrill, Hyperapp, Rax, dva, Omi, Neo.mjs, Crank.js, Polymer, Inferno, Ember, Hyperapp, Cycle.js, Stencil and Relay

This isn't to say that these project are dead, but more so that the features and notions have been further developed by the frameworks listed above.

Many of these I either used, or played around with (back in the day), and I see concepts that they've invented being refined and bought back by the modern frameworks we use and love today.

By it's very nature, frontend development changes rapidly, and as such so does the tooling that we use.

If you're concerned by the thought that something you learn today, may not be relevant tomorrow, here's my thoughts:

  • The skills and ways of thinking are easily transferable from one framework to another
  • Larger, and corporate-backed frameworks (e.g. React and Angular) will stick around
  • The rapidly changing landscape of frontend is likely to continue, if this really bothers you, there are other software engineering areas which remain much more consistent

Meta Frameworks

I've not mentioned meta-frameworks (except Astro), which provide an additional layer of abstraction, giving you certain essential features like file-based + API routes, SSR, + SSG. If you're interested, let me know below as I'm happy explain more, and share my experiences of using these.

But in short, if you're building a larger app then using a meta-framework can save you time, give you an improved developer experience, simplified setup for larger projects and out-of-the-box performance optimizations and integrated best practices.
Though the extra overhead usually isn't worth it for mini apps and small SPA projects (IMO).

Some popular examples you may have come across include: Astro, SvelteKit (for Svelte), Nuxt (for Vue), SolidStart (for Solid), Next.js, Remix, Gatsby (for React) Analog (for Angular), Qwik City (for Qwik).

Non-JavaScript Frameworks

Using a frontend JS-based framework is not the only way to build web apps in 2026!

I didn't have time to go into these here, but if you're interested let me know and I'll write another post.

But in short, here are the main alternatives:

  • HTMX - Access dynamic features directly in your HTML, with a server returning HTML fragments
  • Rust WebAssembly - Frameworks like Yew, Dioxus, Leptos, Sycamore are great for high-performance, cross-platforms, secure apps, which compile to a single light-weight binary
  • Flutter - Flutter for Web let's you write apps in Dart, and have a shared codebase for your mobile and web apps
  • Blazor - A C#-based Web Assembley framework. Great for leveraging existing .NET libraries and tools, and has a robust component model
  • Elm - Functional language that compiles down to JavaScript, with some great tooling
  • SSR Frameworks - Many backend frameworks like Django, Ruby on Rails, Laravel, etc also let you build simple frontends, with simple deployment and great SEO
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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Wow great stuff!

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

And epic domain...

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Debajyati Dey

Bring more such articles!

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alptekin I.

Hi, this is absolutely awesome, i mean experiencing all these technologies, which seems to be like life-time to me.
Thanks for this post.
I am using react and vue, more skilled / experienced in react. Sometimes, if i have some gap time in developing in Vue, i find it cumbersome to get used to the differences between react and vue.
Imho, devs might have preferences and in regard to these, might be more skilled in one than the other, in parallel to the time they spend on these tech of course. On the other hand, it seems to me that, the selection of a tech (especially a JS framework) mostly depends on the experience and preference of the team or organization. I think that not many devs have the similar experience in working with so many variety of techs as you do.

Best,

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mezieb profile image
Okoro chimezie bright

Thanks for sharing and i totally agree with you on Angular i have been using it for large app is amazing everything i need in frontend is one place the Angular way,for large app standard structure and consistency matters as any one can onboard easily everything stay where they are suppose to stay hahaha, Angular is really give me a good developer experience,upgrade straight forward to large codebase hahaha thanks once again and Happy New Year

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Jonathan Gamble

Ripple?

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Sylwia Laskowska

At first I felt a tiny bit of inner resistance - like, how can someone write such an insanely awesome post? 😄 And wait… that many frameworks? I thought I knew a lot, and it turns out I really know like four well!
Then I checked out your website and GitHub and just… WOW. Those frameworks are only a small part of your contribution to the community - that’s incredible!
You’re absolutely inspiring. Of course I’m hitting follow and I’ll be waiting for more posts! 😊

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lissy93 profile image
Alicia Sykes

Thank you Sywia 🩷
I've followed you back :) x

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ustas4 profile image
ustas4

Check streamlit, nicegui

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youngfra profile image
Fraser Young

Thank you!

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Gianni Feduzi

Missing Phoenix framework.

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Loki

That's awesome !!!

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Akshat Ramanathan

Love your website domain name. Awesome article.

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L. Cordero

This is great, thanks!

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Sri Ram Sai Pavan Relangi

Wow I loved this article very much! Learned a lot of frontend frameworks!

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gthomas2

Absolutely amazing. It's made me feel pretty lazy to only have learnt a few frameworks! Must have taken ages to put this together.

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Pinesh Patel

Super refreshing, no hype - just real-world builds + honest trade-offs.
The benchmarks + Stack Match make this insanely useful for anyone choosing a frontend stack