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Vamsi Krishna
Vamsi Krishna

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VITE vs CREATE REACT APP - A Quick Comparison

In the modern web development world, developers are always looking for tools and frameworks that can make their work more efficient and productive. When it comes to building React applications, the two most popular options are VITE and Create React App (CRA). Let's understand what the difference is between VITE and CRA.

What is create-react-app? 🔥

CRA is a build tool that developers can use to spin up a React project quickly. Projects created using CRA come with pre-configured things such as basic file structuring for websites and packages like Babel or Webpack, which work under the hood. CRA also provides a development server to run the website locally for faster and easier development.

The following command can be used to spin up a React application using CRA:

npx create-react-app my-app

What is VITE? 🔥

VITE is also a build tool, just like CRA. VITE aims to provide a faster and leaner development experience for modern web projects. It has two major components.

  1. A development server with additional features over native ES6 modules like HMR (hot module reload).

  2. A build command that bundles your code

The following command can be used to spin up a React application using VITE:

npm create vite@latest

and then follow the prompts.

VITE can be used with various frontend frameworks and libraries like React, Vue, etc.

🚀🔥 Following are some areas where VITE is actually better than CRA during development:

  1. Development speed

VITE is an ultra-fast development server when compared with CRA's decent development server.

2 Performance

VITE is known for its optimized production builds, which result in faster loads.

VITE is best suited for small to medium projects, but CRA is recommended when working on larger projects.

In conclusion, both VITE and CRA are powerful tools for building React applications. Your choice should be based on specific project needs.

Top comments (6)

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webjose profile image
José Pablo Ramírez Vargas

VITE is best suited for small to medium projects, but CRA is recommended when working on larger projects.

Why?

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vamsitupakula_ profile image
Vamsi Krishna

The purpose behind designing VITE is to be simple and fast. Most of the large applications that we create may require more complex build processes.

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webjose profile image
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José Pablo Ramírez Vargas • Edited

This literally tells me nothing. Simple isn't synonym of incapable. Also, Vite is fully extensible via its plug-in architecture. I would like to see a concrete example of a scenario that CRA (webpack) can build that Vite (rollup) cannot.

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http400 profile image
PawelPawelPawel

I'm curious as well. CRA is not recommended anymore even by the React team:
react.dev/learn/start-a-new-react-...

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vamsitupakula_ profile image
Vamsi Krishna

Yes!

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elsyng profile image
Ellis • Edited

That page is not recommending or even mentioning vite at all.

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