Top 10 Vue Alternatives

This article will explore ten of the best Vue alternatives. The list includes React, jQuery, EmberJS, Elm, InfernoJS, Angular, Nest, etc.

Despite being one of the newer JavaScript frameworks, Vue JS has been consistently growing in popularity over the years.

It was built to improve the existing JavaScript tools like Angular, React, and Ember, and combined their best approaches with other features to make web development faster and easier.

With its latest versions, Vue is lightweight and flexible, meaning it can be employed on a vast number of projects with different use cases.

That said, the fact that it is one of the newer frameworks makes Vue widely less adopted than some of the existing ones, meaning the shortcomings of this framework will appear to stand out more than the others.

For instance, there is a substantial lack of plugins which becomes annoying when developers have to switch to other languages to implement certain features.

In the following post, we take a look at some of the pros and cons of Vue as a JavaScript framework followed by some of the top Vue JS alternatives available to developers right now.

If you are wondering about using Vue for your upcoming projects, the following list should help you make an informed decision about the same.

What is Vue? 

Vue is a popular open-source Model-View-ViewModel JavaScript front-end framework that is used to create user interfaces and single-page apps.

It consists of a core library that focuses on the view layer along with a comprehensive layer of supporting libraries for additional features.

Therefore, it takes care of everything that the user will see when they visit your website, i.e., the graphics, clickable elements, the login page, etc.

Being a progressive framework, Vue can be incrementally integrated into an existing project as per requirements.

Apart from web interfaces, Vue can be used to develop mobile and desktop apps with the Electron framework.

The JavaScript base along with HTML extensions made Vue an easy choice for developing and maintaining the front-end of several popular names including Adobe, Alibaba, Gitlab, and Xiaomi.

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Advantages of Vue

• Simplicity

Vue is one of the most lightweight frameworks available and you can write your app within 500-600 lines of code; a fully featured Vue application will still be significantly smaller than one developed using the CLI of Angular.

It achieves this by streamlining the app development cycle and conducting automation tasks like DOM data linking, configurations, etc., under the hood.

• Component-based architecture

Being based on the MVVM pattern is not a limitation for Vue; it can be used with a different architectural approach like Component-Based Architecture (CBA) like Angular and React.

Essentially, this approach allows the frontend code of the application to be divided into independent components, i.e., template, logic, styles, etc., which are portable, reusable, and easily tested.

• High Performance

Bundling at around 20kb, you would be tempted to think that Vue is only suitable for simpler projects. However, despite its small size, Vue does not compromise a bit on the productivity or performance front.

It is blazingly fast to install, and you can start developing an app within minutes. Moreover, high page loading times also help with the on-page SEO of your websites.

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Disadvantages of Vue

• Lack of scalability

Compared to other well-established frameworks, Vue has smaller community support with fewer developers working on developing apps using it.

While there is a vast ecosystem of tools and companion libraries available to the developers, the lack of strong immediate assistance from a robust community makes it less suitable for larger projects.

• Lack of plugins

Vue is developed independently by its owner Evan You and some other Vue enthusiasts without the backing of tech giants like Facebook (React) and Google (Angular).

The rollout speed for new plugins is substantially lower and there is a lack of commonly used plugins. To implement certain features, developers might have to switch to other languages constantly, which can be frustrating.

• Excessive code flexibility 

While code flexibility is a good thing 9 days out of 10, it also has its downsides, mainly in regard to code irregularity and errors.

When you are in the ecosystem, you will notice that most of the code delays are caused due to excessive code flexibility; giving your team too much flexibility and too many options can result in multiple philosophically different approaches within the same team.

Top 10 Vue Alternatives

This article will explore ten of the best Vue competitors.

React

Facebook’s React excels at Vue’s shortcomings, i.e., large-scale web projects. While it was originally designed to build app UIs, it can now be used to design and maintain frontend JavaScript ecosystems with ease.

React brings several notable features to JS development like virtual DOM, one-way data binding, etc. To build complex apps, you will have to use third-party solutions for almost everything as it does not come with official packages for state management or routing.

Keep reading to discover more competitors to Vue.

jQuery

jQuery is arguably one of the most widely implemented JS libraries with it being used in over 70% of the top 10 million popular websites on the internet.

Distributed under the MIT license, jQuery is designed to streamline the traversal navigation and manipulation of the HTML DOM, i.e., it makes it easier to use JavaScript on your website.

jQuery wraps tasks requiring multiple lines of code like event handling, CSS animations, and Ajax into a single line of code.

Ember JS

Ember is an open-source JavaScript web framework that follows a component-service pattern compared to Vue’s CBA, allowing developers to build scalable client-side web apps using the common idioms and best practices from other single-page-app ecosystems.

Essentially, Ember enables easier access to jQuery’s features, presenting a rather simple API that makes it easier to develop complex projects.

Mithril

Mithril is a small JavaScript framework used to create client-side single-page web applications. It bundles smaller than Vue (<10kb) but offers similar performance along with XHR and routing capabilities out of the box.

Mithril has far fewer concepts and usually organizes the app in terms of components and a data layer, making it the first choice for many developers starting in JS development.

Svelte

Svelte has one of the most unique approaches to building web app user interfaces out of the Vue JS alternatives mentioned in this list.

Unlike React and Vue, which complete most of the tasks in the browser, Svelte does not work in the browser; instead, it shifts the work into a compile step and updates the DOM instantly, offering better speed, reactivity, and scalability. 

Elm

Elm is a domain-specific programming language that compiles to JavaScript and is used to create web-browser-based GUIs declaratively.

Being purely functional, Elm was designed with an emphasis on performance, robustness, and usability. It comes with a built-in robust Type system and a compiler, using type inference to detect parameters at extreme levels, thereby helping the user detect and solve run time exceptions.

Compared to Vue, Elm can produce more compact bundle sizes, which improves the render times and app performance.

Inferno JS

Inferno JS is a React-like full-stack JavaScript library that is used to develop effective user interfaces on both the client and server.

It has a partial synthetic event system and is extremely proficient in the isomorphic rendering of real-time data flows, which makes it exceptionally faster in rendering, updating, and removing elements from the DOM.

Instead of following the MVC or MVVM patterns, Inferno also uses the component-based approach like Vue to make the code predictable and reusable.

Angular

Google’s Angular is a platform and client-side framework that is used to build single-page web, desktop, and mobile apps using TypeScript, a typed superset of JavaScript, and HTML.

It is also a component-based framework and a suite of developer tools to develop, build, test, and update the code.

Angular is heavily used in developing progressive web applications, UI animations, business web applications, and web and mobile apps.

Backbone JS

Backbone JS is a lightweight JavaScript library with a RESTful JSON interface based on the MVC design paradigm.

It is highly flexible, offers a simple model for representing data, and is dependent only on one JavaScript library, i.e., Underscore.JS.

Backbone is primarily used to develop single-page web apps and to keep multiple clients and the server synchronized.

Nest JS

NestJS is arguably one of the fastest-growing NodeJS frameworks and Vue alternatives. Written in TypeScript, NestJS is an open-source, progressive, versatile, and extensible framework in the NodeJS environment that is used to create compelling and demanding backend systems.

It is heavily influenced by React, Vue, and Angular and offers several features like dependency injection out of the box, allowing developers to write scalable, loosely coupled apps easily.

Conclusion

Vue is arguably one of the most appropriate frameworks for server-side asynchronous rendering.

However, it has certain downsides which become apparent in specific use-cases where some of the other alternatives to Vue mentioned above might be more suitable.

Developers will need to be vigilant about the type of project and its requirements before selecting from one of the top Vue alternatives discussed above.

To get a deeper insight into which software tools and technologies are better suited for your project, make sure to take it up with the experts at one of the leading app hosting companies. 

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