Insights

Frontend Frameworks: Svelte, Vue, React

Mar 28, 2024

Frontend frameworks play a crucial role in standardizing website development and enhancing performance, especially for large-scale projects requiring interactivity and sophisticated functionality.

Svelte

Streamlined Development, Minimal Code

Advantages

Svelte simplifies the creation of intricate websites and web applications through its intuitive and elegant tooling.

Svelte-based websites typically boast smaller file sizes, resulting in quicker loading times for users.

Svelte generates native JavaScript during its build process, making it better suited for Baidu and other China-based search engines.

Despite its relative novelty, Svelte enjoys support from an enthusiastic community and backing from Vercel, fostering its long-term adoption.

Disadvantages

Due to its newer status, Svelte has a smaller ecosystem compared to Vue or React, translating to fewer developers and live production sites.

Vue and React offer more standard features and plugins, many of which are developed by their extensive communities.

In particular, Svelte currently lacks official localization support, necessitating developers to find their own solutions.

Vue

Established and intuitive, popular in China

Advantages

Vue is easy to learn and intuitive, with a structure that mimics native html, javascript, and css.

Offering a balanced middle ground, Vue is simpler to use than React while being more mature than Svelte.

Created by Evan You, a Chinese developer, Vue enjoys significant popularity in China, boasting abundant community resources and developers available.

Disadvantages

Vue's simplicity and intuitiveness have been overshadowed by Svelte's superior performance in similar tasks.

As the product of a smaller team, Vue has less corporate backing, making its future less certain.

Vue's transition from version 2 to 3 presented challenges for some developers, leading them to pursue other frameworks.

React

The industry standard

Advantages

React boasts the largest adoption rate, with the most developers and live production sites.

Despite its age, React remains versatile, capable of handling various use cases effectively.

Besides its large community, React is backed by Facebook, ensuring even more long-term stability.

Disadvantages

React has a steeper learning curve, posing challenges for novice developers.

Compared to Vue and Svelte, developing in React may be more complex and time-consuming.

React is currently undergoing significant changes, causing some community fragmentation over its future direction.

More Options

  • Solid is similar to React, but prioritizes performance and developer experience.
  • Astro is content-focused, with some innovative design and development features.
  • Angular is an older framework with a steep learning curve, popular in enterprise settings.

Our Experience

At Lantern, we launched our first React site in 2018, transitioning to Vue in 2022, and Svelte in 2023.

While we maintain websites using all three frameworks, Svelte is our preferred choice for new projects, as it allows us to develop faster and more intuitively.