When deciding which JavaScript framework to choose for an existing project, it usually comes around to Angular vs React vs Vue. For this article, we are going to make a head-to-head comparison between React and Vue.

1. What is Vue?
2. What is React?
3. Vue vs React performance
4. Vue vs React popularity
5. Vue vs React state management
6. Key differences between Vue and React
7. SEO: Vue vs React
8. Which is better, Vue or React?
9. Will Vue replace React?
10. Is React easier than Vue?
11. Examples of apps built with React
12. Example of apps built with Vue
13. Conclusion: Vue vs React: What to choose in 2021?
1. What is Vue?
Named by Evan You, its creator, a “progressive framework”, Vue had its first public appearance in 2014. Initially used exclusively in China, this popular JavaScript framework is now used worldwide and among the best options for developing intuitive user interfaces as well as Single Page Applications (SPAs).

Vue features two-way binding and uses a virtual DOM—a copy of the actual DOM. However, the primary reason why people are drawn to this framework is its progressive design—this allows developers to migrate already existing projects gradually. This can be done by moving each feature, one by one.

Vue is an open-source project, continuously developed further and maintained by its growing community. There are a lot of big names that are associated with Vue, like BuzzFeed, Grammarly, Nintendo, Trustpilot, and many more.

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2. What is React?
Technically not a framework, React is a JavaScript library that is used in web development for interactive elements on websites and UIs. Created by Jordan Walke while working at Facebook, React is also used in creating SPAs and mobile apps.

This JS library grants a lot of flexibility since it uses components—isolated pieces of code—that can be used to create more complex logic and UIs. It also uses a virtual DOM to interact with HTML documents, but all elements are represented as js objects.

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3. Vue vs React performance
When it comes to performance, since both Vue and React share common elements, they’re generally equal. They use lazy loading to increase performance rates and lower loading times, and virtual DOMs.

Both Vue and React have excellent performance, each with its own advantages. For instance, memory allocation and startup times are a little better with Vue, whereas, at runtime, React takes the lead.

Nevertheless, there are situations where there is a clear difference in performance between the two. For example:

The modification of a React component state triggers the re-rendering of all of the components in its subtree.
In Vue, these dependencies are tracked—so unnecessary re-rendering is prevented.
Among the two, Vue can handle high frames rate—10 frames/second, as compared to React with 1 FPS.

4. Vue vs React popularity
A good way to measure the popularity of a framework or library is to see how many stars their Github repositories have.

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As you can see, ever since 2017, Vue has been right there with React among the most popular frameworks.

As of 2021, Vue has 181K Github stars—and can be considered the most popular JavaScript framework. In the second place, React runs close with 165K stars—continuing to grow.

According to Google Trends, over the past 12 months, companies were looking to hire React developers, followed by Vue and Angular in a neck-to-neck battle. Having this in mind, React jobs are the most popular, followed by Angular, and then Vue—that’s how the job market looked like in 2020.

Another factor here would be the users of each framework. For example, amongst the users of Vue, there’s Trustpilot, BMW, Vice, Nintendo, Adobe Portfolio, Euronews, and many others. On the other hand, BBC, Airbnb, Facebook, PayPal, Netflix, Instagram, and a lot of other popular names, use React.

5. Vue vs React state management
The term state refers to the data that is shared between all your UI components. Naturally, as your system grows, it’s getting harder and harder to manage this. In such scenarios, React offers a single way of modifying the state—simplifying the debugging process.

Redux

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In Vue, this is managed a little differently. The local state is unnecessary since you can modify the data by using the data property of the object. Still, for larger apps, you need an external library for state management.

Vuex

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6. Key differences between Vue and React
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How do you write Hello World in React?
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How do you write Hello World in Vue?
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7. SEO: Vue vs React
If you use React or Vue, you get a SPA (Single Page Application) that needs Javascript to show any content on your page. Recently, Google announced that their crawl bot can now render paged wish JS and index them. However, most SEO professionals agree that even now Google has a hard time reading and indexing pages like that.