When to Use Vue Over React

A highly opinionated article based on my experience as a front-end web developer over the last four years

Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash

I use React professionally at my current job, but I choose Vue for all personal projects. It’s my preferred framework of choice. I’ve used Vue in previous (publicly traded) companies, and it scaled incredibly well.

Any seasoned developer will tell you software is all about trade-offs and throwing around objective statements like “Framework x is better than Framework y” are generally meaningless. By what metrics? In whose opinion? For this reason, I’ll compare Vue and React across three main concerns that are often competing trade-offs.

1. Performance
2. Scalability
3. Job Market

Performance

Performance is usually where people want to start when discussing frameworks or languages. Everyone who writes software is building the next FAANG company, and every nanosecond of performance must be extracted from our code.

I’m going to compare both frameworks on two components of performance, namely silicon time and carbon time. Silicon time refers to the raw execution performance — how fast it can run in the browser. Carbon time refers to how fast developers can build products in the code.

Silicon-time comparison

JS framework trade-offs for performance

React leverages JSX, which gives developers a lot of power to build arbitrarily complex logic. We can harness the Turing-complete power of JavaScript and treat our view as data. Something like Svelte leverages templates for markup that provide a rigid structure to the view layer.

React and Vue both use a virtual DOM (VDOM), which, while practically fast enough, is inherently expensive and almost purely overhead. Svelte compiles template code to raw JS and manipulates the DOM directly, which means it doesn’t have the performance overheads of maintaining a VDOM.

What I love about Vue is it hedges its bets a little bit. The most common way to use Vue…