Comparing Vue vs Angular

This article is a guest post written by Zsolt Nagy and originally posted on ButterCMS blog.

Years ago, it seemed like everyone wanted to write his or her own framework. Besides Knockout, Backbone, Marionette, software developers thought they could earn bragging rights by reinventing the wheel and creating their own framework. The churn rate was very high, and developers had to learn a lot to keep up with the pace. Fortunately, the framework wars and the days of ultra high churn rates are over. Three participants carved out their own niche: React, Angular, and Vue. As Angular and Vue are similar in terms of syntax, in this article, we will compare and contrast Angular and Vue.

Although the syntax of the two frameworks is similar, the use cases for Angular and Vue are different. These use cases are well illustrated by the history of each framework.

Angular is a highly popular corporate solution. Banks, financial institutions, and backend developers normally favor Angular. Angular is backed by Google, and companies like WhatsApp, Instagram, PayPal, and many other established companies use it.

Some popular websites made using Angular:

Source: MadeWithAngular

Vue was created by Evan You, an ex-Google employee. In fact, Evan worked on Angular at Google, which means he has an in-depth understanding of the ins and outs of Angular. The pitch of Vue is to build fast, progressive JavaScript applications quickly. Companies like Alibaba, GitLab, Grammarly trust Vue.js, and it seems these companies appreciate the benefits of Vue.

Angular is the default commercial solution for developing enterprise application clients. Angular is a bigger, more mature framework, and it generally takes more time to develop applications. Vue on the other hand is great for simple, performant applications, as well as for rapid prototyping.

 Some popular websites made using Vue:

Source: Techuz

Comparison by Numbers

Community size

Angular is definitely the more stable solution out of the two due to the backing of Google. As a result, Angular tends to evolve at a healthy pace. Angular has 313k followers on Twitter, compared to 128k followers of Vue. This is not a direct indication of how popular the technologies are, and neither is Google Trends. The problem with Google Trends is that it does not necessarily recognize searches containing Vue and Vue.js as the same topic. The Vue.js search term may just gives us a fraction of the search results, while the Vue search term may yield results that have nothing to do with Vue.js. Therefore, the comparison is not obvious. There are obviously more people searching for Angular, but Vue was never expected to compete with Angular.

To get somewhat of an idea of the recent usage of Angular and Vue, here are the total number of downloads in the last year by developers from NPM:

  GitHub activity

The GitHub Activity of the two frameworks is really interesting. Vue has more stars and forks than Angular. At the time of writing this article, Vue has 18.2k forks and 130k stars, while Angular has only 11.8k forks and 45.3k stars. Vue has clearly become more popular among the masses. Angular only leads in terms of the number of contributions: 845 vs 260. This is expected though, as Angular has been around longer than Vue.

Developer Experience

According to the State of Js 2018 Survey, Vue.js does something right. Vue positions not only offer similar average salaries as Angular salaries, but the number of developers abandoning Vue.js after trying it out is a lot smaller than the number of Angular developers who want to abandon Angular. Currently, around the same number of experienced developers are willing to work with Vue and Angular, but Angular has been abandoned by a seriously large number of developers, possibly in favor of Vue and React. According to the survey, more people are interested in learning Vue than Angular.

Job Market Trends

At the same time, the job market still favors.....to continue reading the rest of the article, head on over to our ButterCMS blog!