In the world of frontend development, choosing the right framework is crucial to optimize performance and ensure a good user experience. In this article, we analyze four of the most popular frameworks/libraries: React, Angular, Vue, and Svelte, comparing them in terms of weight, performance, rendering speed, and ease of learning.
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1. Svelte: The Leanest and Most Performant
🔹Initial size: ~1.6 KB (min+gzip)
🔹Performance: Excellent, because it doesn't use a virtual DOM
🔹Rendering speed: Very high, thanks to direct compilation to JavaScript
🔹Learning curve: Easy
🔹Ecosystem: Less mature than React and Angular
Svelte is unique in its approach: instead of executing code in the browser with a runtime, it compiles components to pure JavaScript. This makes it extremely fast and lightweight, avoiding the overhead of a virtual DOM.
When to choose it?
- If you want an ultra-optimized and lightweight app
- If you are looking for a simpler syntax than React or Angular
- If you don't need a very large ecosystem
📌 Benchmark: According to JS Framework Benchmark tests, Svelte offers the best performance in terms of rendering time and responsiveness.
2. Vue: The Best Balance Between Performance and Ease
🔹Initial size: ~16 KB (min+gzip)
🔹Performance: Very good, thanks to an optimized virtual DOM
🔹Rendering Speed: Faster than React, but slower than Svelte
🔹Learning Curve: Easy/Moderate
🔹Ecosystem: Mature, with great support
Vue is appreciated for its flexibility and simplicity, with a clear syntax and a gentle learning curve. It uses a reactive and optimized virtual DOM, improving performance compared to React.
When to choose it?
- If you want a framework that is easy to learn, but powerful
- If you are looking for a good balance between performance and community
- If you need a framework with support for both small and large applications
📌 Benchmark: In the JS Framework Benchmark tests, Vue shows very good handling of rendering and DOM operations, positioning itself between React and Svelte in terms of speed.
3. React: The Largest Ecosystem
🔹Initial size: ~42 KB (min+gzip)
🔹Performance: Good, but with higher overhead than Vue and Svelte
🔹Rendering Speed: Depends on optimizations (memoization, concurrent mode)
🔹Learning Curve: Moderate
🔹Ecosystem: The largest, with the most libraries available
React is the most popular frontend library in the world. Based on a virtual DOM, React can be highly performant, but requires manual optimizations such as useMemo and useCallback.
When to choose it?
- If you want maximum compatibility with third-party libraries
- If you work in a team with other developers
- If you develop long-term projects with a large community support
📌 Benchmark: React is not the fastest among the frameworks tested in JS Framework Benchmark, but with advanced optimization techniques it can compete well with Vue.
4. Angular: The Most Complete, but Heavy
🔹Initial size: ~75 KB (min+gzip)
🔹Performance: Good, but heavier for small projects
🔹Rendering speed: Slower than Vue and React
🔹Learning curve: High
🔹Ecosystem: Large, with many features included
Angular is a complete and structured framework, ideal for large-scale enterprise applications. However, it is heavier and more complex than the others, making it less suitable for small or medium projects.
When to choose it?
- If you work in an enterprise context with large teams
- If you need a framework with everything included (routing, state management, dependency injection)
- If you want a solid and scalable architecture
📌 Benchmark: In the JS Framework Benchmark tests, Angular is the slowest of the four frameworks analyzed, mainly due to its structural overhead.
Which Framework to Choose?
🔥 The choice depends on the project:
- Choose Svelte for the best performance and lightness
- Choose Vue if you want a good balance between simplicity and power
- Choose React if you want maximum community support
- Choose Angular for complex enterprise applications
If you want maximum speed and minimalism, Svelte is the right choice. For more structured projects, Vue or React offer an excellent compromise. Finally, Angular remains the best for complex enterprise applications. 🚀
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Top comments (9)
React is like Laravel in the PHP world... You get everything you need, a lot more of what you don't, really bad performance (compared to most other frameworks), but somehow it manages to remain the de facto standard.
Angular would be the Laravel, batteries included... React is the complete opposite of Laravel tbh... It doesn't include any batteries, you have to pick everything yourself from the ecosystem.
Why skip Solid?
there is no particular reason, i will include it in my next articles 😉
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Which JavaScript framewok to chosse for this year?
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The fastest frontend framework is no frontend framework.
Unless you absolutely need strong SPA features where things HAVE to change without a reload, then just use express and a server-side templating engine and go about your day. You'll save significant amounts of time and energy and likely wind up with a more performant/smaller result in the end.
If you really need to be a SPA, then vue or svelte are going to be a smoother dev experience of you need to learn a framework from scratch. If you already are familiar with a specific framework, then that is your next best pick. I'd stay away from react if you can, I've seen far more teams get it wrong than right and I don't think it's good stewardship to use a tool that leads to higher rates of dev errors and performance degradations over one that is more difficult to screw up.
It's a bit paradoxical but you can actually make a framework at least a little bit faster than typical vanilla when performing DOM updates, but also significantly faster and more responsive for when you have massive amounts of updates and you start adding schedulers, sync up with animation frames, web worker bridges, etc... all the usual good stuff that if you start adding to a vanilla app, you'd end up calling a framework anyway, in the end. :)
How did you deduce Angular performance as "Good (but heavy)" from the benchmark you mentioned. To me it looks exactly same if not slightly better than react in terms of performance. What does the "heavy" mean? Is it memory or cpu usage or something else? From what I've seen, angular uses less runtime memory since it does not have a virtual dom like react and similar frameworks and uses an incremental dom.
Nothing gonna replace or compete with React as of now nor in span of 2 or 3 years. React is way ahead.
PS: Not against other frameworks.