Today each and every company in the market wants to have a website or landing page therefore it would be important to look at the advantages and disadvantages of some of the most popular JavaScript frameworks so that the developers can pick the best among them and build amazing websites using them.

Most of the developers nowadays use JavaScript frameworks while building the frontend of a website as it brings many benefits like efficiency, security and cost saving. There are many JavaScript frameworks available in the market. For the front-end developers it is a challenge to decide any single JavaScript framework especially when a single page application is required. That’s why businesses are always in hunt for best web development companies in India as they are expert in developing amazing websites using best JS frameworks.

To assist developers in making the choice of best JS framework we have come up with a list of top and most popular JavaScript frameworks which are Angular (Angular 2 or later), React and VueJS. You can choose anyone of these and add few libraries and packages as per your requirements to make them complete. React and VueJS are basically collection of libraries but generally called by term framework for the sake of simplicity.

When we check the statistics, we find that currently Angular framework is being used in about 4,06,854 websites and React is being used in about 7,66,722 websites while Vue is being used in about 2,17,144 live websites.

This shows all of these three frameworks are quite popular although React is leading. Actually, React JS is leading in most countries, including US, China, Japan and most other countries while Angular JS is leading in Russia, Taiwan and many other countries. If you talk to any best web development company in India, you will find that it also suggests to use any of these framework for developing best quality websites.

Look at this Stackoverflow 2018 survey. It says that Angular is loved by about 54% of the developers while React is loved by about 69% of the developers.

We can also know more about their popularity by looking at the number of stars that their GitHub repositories get.

As on 03/12/2018 number of stars on GitHub projects for Angular, React, and Vue:

• Angular – 33450
• Vuejs/vue – 108078
• Facebook/react – 106798

Let’s now discuss about the pros and cons of these JavaScript frameworks in detail to make your selection process more easier:

Angular

Angular is a TypeScript based JavaScript MVVM framework. It was founded in 2009 and is backed by Google which is a huge plus for its users. It is used for developing highly interactive web applications. Angular is used by Google, WhatsApp, Forbes and many other fortune 500 companies. Therefore, since many years it has been one of the most popular framework.

Angular has a strong community around it which provides regular training materials, discussions, and third party tools to support people who are using AngularJS and it also resolves their ongoing issues. This trend continues even today when we now have Angular 2+.

You have to hire best software development company in India if you want to build high quality website based on Angular JS framework.

Pros of Angular JS:

• It has component based architecture which provides a higher quality of code.

• It brings reusability as developers can reuse components across different parts of an application. This is useful in enterprise scope application which use similar elements like sorting lists, search boxes and date pickers.

• It is unit-test friendly as the independent nature of components simplifies unit tests, quality assurance methods to verify the performance of the smallest parts of the applications i.e. units.

• It offers maintainability as the components which are easily decoupled from each other are easily replaced with better implementations.

Cons of Angular JS:

• It requires more time as migrating old systems from AngularJS to Angular needs time. There is a huge difference between AngularJS and Angular hence the path of migration is from the past to the future. We can do it in different ways like to use a hybrid approach which includes having both old and new Angular operating at the same time while we incrementally update the whole product. It takes time and also we have to review many tools and deal with a heavier application.

• It involves steep learning curve as new developers who know JavaScript and want to learn and use new Angular require more work than to learn to use React or Vue. They need to learn about modules, dependency injection, components, services, templates etc. They also need to learn RxJS, a reactive programming library for asynchronous programming which is compulsory to work with Angular.

React

Although so many people generally call React a framework but actually it is a JavaScript library for building UI components for web applications. React was developed by Facebook and was released in 2013. Facebook uses React in its popular applications like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The latest stable version of React is 16.x which was released in 2018. Other than Facebook, it is also used by Uber, Netflix, PayPal, Walmart, Twitter, Udemy and many other popular websites.

The technological world highly appreciates the benefits provided by React. That’s why so many of the top web development services in India prefer React JS framework to build incredible websites.

Pros of React:

• Its update process is highly optimized and fast.

• It has JSX which makes components code readable. It displays how components are plugged or combined.

• React’s data binding helps in creating dynamic applications.

• It supports prompts rendering.

• React is SEO friendly. React presents the first load experience by server side rendering and connecting event handlers on the side of the user.

• React is up to date as Facebook is supporting it. Facebook community also gives prompt advice and code samples whenever requires.

• React uses JavaScript ES6 which is much easier than learning TypeScript for Angular.

Cons of React:

• It has a bit difficult learning curve. As it is not a fully featured framework hence it requires in-depth knowledge of integrating user interface free library into MVC framework.

• View-orientendness is one of the cons of ReactJS. It should be found 'Model' and 'Controller' to resolve 'View' problem.

• It doesn’t use isomorphic approach to exploit application which leads to search engines indexing problems.

• JSX React’s documentation and manuals are difficult for the newcomers to understand.

• React generally has very large library.

Vue.js

Vue.js is one of the fastest growing JavaScript framework. It is popular because of its ability to build attractive UIs using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Vue was developed by ex-Google engineer Evan You in 2014. Although Vue doesn’t have any solid backing but still it is becoming popular quite fast. The latest stable version is 2.17 which was released in 2018. Vue is currently being used by Baidu, Alibaba, GitLab and more. Vue describes itself as an intuitive, fast and integrable framework for creating interactive interfaces and most of its developers agree to that.

It is also less traditional and much simpler to learn for new developers as compared to other similar frameworks. Vue.js is being used by Alibaba, Expedia, Nintendo and by so many other enterprise level projects. Vue also has big community and the problems and questions are responded more quickly than in the case with other frameworks like Angular and React.

Pros of Vue:

• It has large and very helpful documentation which is very thorough and well written. Therefore, even a beginner with some basic knowledge of JavaScript and HTML can write first Vue application with the help of its documentation.

• It takes very less space. The production ready build of Vue.js takes only 18 kb of space after gzipping. Vue.js ecosystem is also small and fast. With Vue.js, users can separate the template-to-virtual-DOM compiler and even the run.

• Vue offers scalability and versatility and it works well both as a library and as a fully-fledged framework.

• Vue.js is incredibly easy to read. Functions are incredibly accessible and if your naming conventions are right “thisFunctionWillDoThis” then you won’t go far wrong.

• Vue.js is easier to learn than jQuery. It is much easier to start building the basics with Vue.js over more traditional JavaScript frameworks such as jQuery.

• It has incredible supportive community.

Cons of Vue:-

• It lacks some common solid plugins and components. As it has lesser age hence there is a lack of common plugins that make working with various tools easier. For example, Google Maps.

• It is evolving too fast. Many Vue users say that it is evolving rather too fast hence a lot of examples and code which you may find online may be outdated. Hence one has to read lots of documentation and may even require an online course in Vue to learn it better.

• It has some minor issues with iOS and Safari.

• If you read Vue documentation you will find there are some reactivity caveats for example the setting of an item from an array directly or adding a new data property.

Conclusion

We have mentioned here only the three top and most popular JavaScript frameworks although there are many more. Based on the above comparison you can find out which is the best JavaScript framework for your project.

For example, if you are developing a large application and looking for a stable platform then you can go with Angular, provided you are comfortable using TypeScript. Else you can also use React as it is favorable for large teams and also has a massive ecosystem revolving around it. Finally, if you want to experiment with a new and promising framework then Vue.js is the best pick for you.

Other best option is to find expert developers to do the job. To get the best results, you can select the top web app development company among them based on their expertise, experience, reputation and other benefits they offer to build your website.