Although numerous JavaScript frameworks have been released so far, none has come close to the holy trinity – Angular, React, and Vue. In this blog post, I’ll make a detailed analysis of Vue and Angular to help you find out which one is better for your front-end development in 2022.

Angular.js and Vue.js are both JavaScript frameworks used for the front-end development of web interfaces. While Angular is a TypeScript structured framework, Vue is more progressive and lightweight. First, let’s comprehend the basics of both web frameworks.

What is Angular all about?

Angular is a front-end framework based on typescript. The first release is dated in 2010 and was known under the Angular JS name. It is developed by Google and has many built-in tools and libraries, making it a great tool for developing large-scale applications with high performance. Among other things, there is the official CLI that helps with creating, managing or updating Angular projects and adding dependencies.

What is Vue.js?

Vue is by far the youngest member of the current top JS frameworks. Initiated by Evan You in 2014, it began to gain popularity very quickly. What distinguishes it, is its developing open-source community. Learning from the ups and downs of Angular and React, Vue tries not to make their mistakes, becoming a faster and simpler child than his predecessors.

The popularity of Angular vs Vue

Until recently, the Angular framework reigned supreme in popularity rankings. Today, the reality is a bit different. Both in terms of Google searches or the number of stars on GitHub, 197k vs 81.9k stars, Vue has a definite advantage. It’s a bit different in the labor market. Vue is still the least popular, but from year to year, there are more and more offers, at a very fast pace chasing the Angular, in which offers have significantly decreased in favor of React. The rapidly growing popularity of Vue is probably due to its greater simplicity and accessibility for novice software developers.

Community and development

How does this popularity translate into the development of the framework itself? Even though Vue has a lot of followers and searches, it is still being developed by the open-source community. For this reason, the number of its contributors is much smaller, because it does not have a developer background of such large corporations as Google or Facebook.

Moreover, Vue is a much younger framework, currently, in the version 3 stage, that’s why, its development history is much smaller yet still extensive.

Differences between Angular and Vue 

TypeScript

If you want to work with Angular, you need to know TypeScript. The entire framework and its documentation are based on it. It has its advantages, like static type checking, which could be useful for large-scale applications. But with smaller projects, the Type system may simply not be needed and be too time-consuming.

With the introduction of version 3 of Vue, it moved to TypeScript, but still, most projects are based on version 2 of it.

Runtime Performance

Both frameworks are exceptionally fast, having their own slight drawbacks. Vue tends to perform better in memory allocation. Angular is generally bulkier than Vue. Unlike Vue, the code written with Angular needs to be rendered fully on the server side, and only then does it get downloaded and runs in the app or browser. As a result, Angular may sometimes be slightly slower at the startup. Although Vue is overall faster, Angular performs much better in DOM manipulation.

Size of Vue and Angular

Vue is considered much lighter and faster. Even with the addition of Vuex, it takes up less due to the large number of components Angular has as standard. Vue 2 project with Vuex + Vue Router included (~30KB gzipped) vs AOT-compiled application generated by angular-cli (~65KB gzipped). Nevertheless, both frameworks have been greatly reduced in size over time and the difference isn’t that big today.

Structure and Flexibility

Vue provides a lot of flexibility to the developer. You can extend your application with many well-known and well-supported libraries like Vuex or Vuetify, which are also recommended by the wide Vue community. This gives you the flexibility to design your application however you want. On the other hand, Angular is characterized by a much more defined app architecture. When developing large-scale apps, Angular works best! Many companies prefer it, due to the standard architecture it provides to all front-end developers. This is a complex factor to consider when deciding between Vue and Angular – think about your front-end team and how they prefer to work.

Data Rendering

Vue uses a virtual DOM. With its help, the virtual DOM framework sorts the default configuration optimized for performance. Whenever the application data changes, it renders a virtual DOM instead of user interfaces. The result is faster application loading times and much more efficient updating of views with help of virtual DOM.

On the contrary, Angular.js doesn’t use Virtual DOMs, unlike other frameworks. Instead, it uses watchers to keep track of the old data values and updates only those parts of the original DOM whose values have changed.

Learning Curve and complexity

If you want to start working with Vue, you need HTML and JavaScript knowledge. With these basic skills and documentation, you can start to create your first projects. On the other hand, Angular’s targeting of larger and more complex applications makes its syntax and structure much more complicated. At the start, you need to have an understanding of such elements as TypeScript, MVC and be familiar with Angular’s huge library. That could be more challenging for beginning developers.

So which one should you choose in 2022 – Vue or Angular?

In fact, these are very different libraries addressed to different development groups and web applications created with them. Certainly, both have their pros and cons. Vue will be a better solution for people with less experience, who want to build slightly smaller applications. In addition, it has only the third version with a separate repository, so it requires less knowledge in the case of working with older projects. On the other hand, Angular is used for creating large applications, and along with its huge library, it requires more care in keeping up with news and updates. So choose the right one.

When to use Vue?

  • You require dynamic high-performance applications
  • You want to develop single-page applications
  • Your priority is higher performance and speed
  • You need the most lightweight framework
  • You require the easiest learning curve.

When to use Angular?

  • You want to develop large-scale, real-time, and dynamic web applications
  • Cross-platform development
  • Large teams 
  • Enterprise software
  • You want to work on big projects.

Contact

Do you want to learn more about the most suitable front-end framework for your project?

Talk to us!

Hopefully, this will help in deciding on the preferred framework for your front-end development in 2022. I’ll just add that it’s crucial to keep an eye on both of them and the trends in the front-end development. A lot of changes in a short time can happen, as it is in the front-end development world. Sometimes, it’s better to reach out to IT experts who can help you decide, taking into consideration your particular project, its scope, and business needs.