Comparison of JavaScript Frontend Frameworks – Angular, React, and Vue

Abstract

This research aims to evaluate JavaScript frontend frameworks by their performance and popularity to provide practitioners with guidance in making informed decisions when choosing frontend frameworks for their projects. For that purpose, three applications with the same features were built using three best-known JavaScript frontend frameworks: Angular, React, and Vue. Comparative analysis was employed to conduct the framework comparison using the content of the three applications. For performance evaluation, tools like PageSpeed Insights, WebPageTest, GTmetrix, Pingdom, Lighthouse, and Google Performance were used. In addition, the research also offers the overall comparison of JavaScript frameworks including documentation quality, ability to develop mobile applications, learning curve, built-in features, etc. The results indicate that while React is accepted as the most popular frontend framework, Vue is the one that offers the best performance. The research also compares JavaScript frameworks by specific features they offer such as state management and analyses the implications of these features to the development process. According to the results, these features have big implications on the development process and they are very important when we are making decisions on which framework we will choose for some project.