Web applications are getting more powerful, therefore the tools for building them need to increase in power too. Web frameworks are becoming better and they make the whole web development process a piece of cake.

While the availability of different frameworks is cool, it generates confusion among developers. Questions like “Which is the best framework?”, “Which is the easiest to learn?”, “Which framework do companies use more?”, are raised.

In this article, we would have a brief overview of the three big frontend web development frameworks, Angular, React, Vue.

We would be looking at the three frameworks in alphabetical order.

Angular

Open sourced in 2010, Angular is a powerful web framework created by Misko Hevery. Angular was built as a side project while Hevery was a developer at Google.

Over time, this framework has experienced a lot of changes. Most notable is the dropping of JavaScript to use TypeScript which led to a change in the framework’s name, from AngularJS to Angular.

Advantages

1. It is a MVC framework
2. It offers great performance
3. It compiles fast
4. It has a large user community
5. Resources are available and are easy to use

Disadvantages

1. It is quite complex
2. Knowledge of TypeScript is needed
3. It doesn’t fare well with Search Engine Optimization

React

Open sourced in 2013, React was created by Jordan Walke. Just like in the case of Angular, React was created while Walke was an employee of a big company, this time Facebook.

Unlike Angular, React is not a framework, instead it’s library. React was built under the influence of XHP which serves as an HTML component for PHP.

React uses JSX, which adds XML/HTML syntax to React applications. The main objective of creating the library was to build HTML components and it does it well.

Advantages

1. React is very lightweight
2. It is the best for building components
3. It is easy to learn
4. It starts up quickly

Disadvantages

1. React uses JSX, which could make development strange
2. While it is easy to learn, it takes a long time to master
3. Since it is mainly used to build components, it needs other tools to be integrated to create features such as routing, form validation etc.

Vue

Open sourced in 2014, Vue was created by Evan You. Unlike React and Angular, Vue wasn’t built with the influence of any big company.

Vue is more like a combination of React and Angular as Evan You merged what he felt were the best components of both frameworks. Vue is used to build event driven web applications using native web APIs, HTML templates and CSS.

Advantages

1. Vue offers great performance
2. It has a great user community
3. It is easy to use through the CLI it provides
4. It has a large number of learning resources

Disadvantages

1. It requires third party tools to build a complete application
2. Its Chinese background means some resources are not in English

Conclusion

Angular, React and Vue are powerful frontend web frameworks, they also have their best use cases.

To wrap it up, let’s take a look at some of them: Angular is the best tool to use for single page applications, React is the best for DOM management, Vue is best for building event driven web applications.