Preact vs Vue.js

Overview

Vue.js

Stacks55.5K

Followers44.7K

Votes1.6K

GitHub Stars209.7K

Forks33.8K

Preact

Stacks1.1K

Followers292

Votes28

Preact vs Vue.js: What are the differences?

Preact and Vue.js are both popular JavaScript libraries that are used for building user interfaces. While they have similarities, they also have key differences that set them apart from each other. In this article, we will explore the key differences between Preact and Vue.js.

Performance: Preact is known for its small footprint and high performance. It is designed to be lean and fast, making it a great choice for applications that require quick rendering and minimal overhead. On the other hand, Vue.js is optimized for efficiency and offers excellent performance as well, but it has a larger file size compared to Preact. This means that Preact might be a better choice if performance is a critical factor for your project.
Learning Curve: When it comes to learning and using these libraries, Vue.js is generally considered to have a more gentle learning curve compared to Preact. Vue.js has a comprehensive documentation and a large community, which makes it easier for developers to get started and find support. Preact, although simpler in terms of codebase, might have a steeper learning curve due to its smaller community and fewer available resources.
Ecosystem: Vue.js has a larger ecosystem compared to Preact. It has a wide range of plugins and extensions that can enhance your development experience. Vue.js also has a more established community and a larger number of contributors, which means that there is a higher chance of finding solutions to common problems. On the other hand, Preact has a smaller ecosystem and fewer available extensions and plugins.
Size: Preact is known for its small size, with the minified version being around 10 KB. In comparison, Vue.js has a larger file size, with the minified version being around 80 KB. This could be a deciding factor if you are working on projects that require small file sizes and faster loading times.
React Compatibility: Preact is designed to be compatible with React, meaning that you can easily migrate React components to Preact without significant changes. This can be beneficial if you are already familiar with React and want to leverage your existing knowledge. Vue.js, on the other hand, has its own syntax and structure, which might require more effort to migrate React components.
Community Support: Vue.js has a larger community and a more active support system. It has a strong presence in the open-source community, which means that there are more resources, tutorials, and libraries available for Vue.js. Preact, although growing steadily, has a smaller community and might not have the same level of support and resources as Vue.js.

In Summary, Preact is known for its performance and small footprint, with a smaller learning curve and ecosystem compared to Vue.js. Vue.js, on the other hand, has a larger ecosystem, better React compatibility, and a more established community support system. Choose Preact if performance and small file size are crucial, while Vue.js might be a better choice if you value a gentle learning curve and a larger community.

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Advice on Vue.js, Preact

Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs adviceon

Vue.js

React

I find using Vue.js to be easier (more concise / less boilerplate) and more intuitive than writing React. However, there are a lot more readily available React components that I can just plug into my projects. I'm debating whether to use Vue.js or React for an upcoming project that I'm going to use to help teach a friend how to build an interactive frontend. Which would you recommend I use?

884k views884k

Comments

Simon

Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH

Apr 22, 2020

Decidedon

Vuetify

Vue.js

Nuxt.js

Our whole Vue.js frontend stack (incl. SSR) consists of the following tools:

@{Nuxt.js}|tool:7304| consisting of @{Vue CLI}|tool:9559|, @{Vue Router}|tool:6932|, @{vuex}|tool:6705|, @{Webpack}|tool:1682| and @{Sass}|tool:1171| (Bundler for @{HTML5}|tool:2538|, @{CSS 3}|tool:6727|), @{Babel}|tool:2739| (Transpiler for @{JavaScript}|tool:1209|),
Vue Styleguidist as our style guide and pool of developed @{Vue.js}|tool:3837| components
@{Vuetify}|tool:6163| as Material Component Framework (for fast app development)
@{TypeScript}|tool:1612| as programming language
@{Apollo}|tool:5508| / @{GraphQL}|tool:3820| (incl. @{GraphiQL}|tool:7879|) for data access layer (https://apollo.vuejs.org/)
@{ESLint}|tool:3337|, @{TSLint}|tool:5561| and @{Prettier}|tool:7035| for coding style and code analyzes
@{Jest}|tool:830| as testing framework
@{Google Fonts}|tool:2652| and @{Font Awesome}|tool:3244| for typography and icon toolkit
@{NativeScript-Vue}|tool:9623| for mobile development

The main reason we have chosen Vue.js over React and AngularJS is related to the following artifacts:

Empowered HTML. Vue.js has many similar approaches with Angular. This helps to optimize HTML blocks handling with the use of different components.
Detailed documentation. Vue.js has very good documentation which can fasten learning curve for developers.
Adaptability. It provides a rapid switching period from other frameworks. It has similarities with Angular and React in terms of design and architecture.
Awesome integration. Vue.js can be used for both building single-page applications and more difficult web interfaces of apps. Smaller interactive parts can be easily integrated into the existing infrastructure with no negative effect on the entire system.
Large scaling. Vue.js can help to develop pretty large reusable templates.
Tiny size. Vue.js weights around 20KB keeping its speed and flexibility. It allows reaching much better performance in comparison to other frameworks.

5.13M views5.13M

Comments

Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs advice

Simple datepickers are cumbersome. For such a simple data input, I feel like it takes far too much effort. Ideally, the native input[type="date"] would just work like it does on FF and Chrome, but Safari and Edge don't handle it properly. So I'm left either having a diverging experience based on the browser or I need to choose a library to implement a datepicker since users aren't good at inputing formatted strings.

For React alone there are tons of examples to use https://reactjsexample.com/tag/date/. And then of course there's the bootstrap datepicker (https://bootstrap-datepicker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), jQueryUI calendar picker, https://github.com/flatpickr/flatpickr, and many more.

How do you recommend going about handling date and time inputs? And then there's always moment.js, but I've observed some users getting stuck when presented with a blank text field. I'm curious to hear what's worked well for people...

401k views401k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Vue.js	Preact
It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.	Preact is an attempt to recreate the core value proposition of React (or similar libraries like Mithril) using as little code as possible, with first-class support for ES2015. Currently the library is around 3kb (minified & gzipped).
Reactivity; Components; Modularity; Animations; Routing; Stability; Extendable Data bindings; Plain JS object models; Build UI by composing components; Mix & matching small libraries	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 209.7K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 33.8K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 55.5K	Stacks 1.1K
Followers 44.7K	Followers 292
Votes 1.6K	Votes 28
Pros & Cons
Pros 294 Simple and easy to start with 230 Good documentation 196 Components 131 Simple the best 100 Simplified AngularJS Cons 9 Less Common Place 5 YXMLvsHTML Markup 3 Only support programatically multiple root nodes 3 Don't support fragments	Pros 15 Lightweight 5 Drop-in replacement for React 4 Performance 3 Props/state passed to render 1 ES6 class components
Integrations
No integrations available	React

What are some alternatives to Vue.js, Preact?

jQuery

jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.

AngularJS

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

React

Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.

jQuery UI

Whether you're building highly interactive web applications or you just need to add a date picker to a form control, jQuery UI is the perfect choice.

Ember.js

A JavaScript framework that does all of the heavy lifting that you'd normally have to do by hand. There are tasks that are common to every web app; It does those things for you, so you can focus on building killer features and UI.

Backbone.js

Backbone supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing models key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful JSON interface.

Svelte

If you've ever built a JavaScript application, the chances are you've encountered – or at least heard of – frameworks like React, Angular, Vue and Ractive. Like Svelte, these tools all share a goal of making it easy to build slick interactive user interfaces. Rather than interpreting your application code at run time, your app is converted into ideal JavaScript at build time. That means you don't pay the performance cost of the framework's abstractions, or incur a penalty when your app first loads.

Angular

It is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework. It is a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications.

Aurelia

Aurelia is a next generation JavaScript client framework that leverages simple conventions to empower your creativity.

Flux

Flux is the application architecture that Facebook uses for building client-side web applications. It complements React's composable view components by utilizing a unidirectional data flow. It's more of a pattern rather than a formal framework, and you can start using Flux immediately without a lot of new code.

Related Comparisons

Preact vs Vue.js: What are the differences?

Performance: Preact is known for its small footprint and high performance. It is designed to be lean and fast, making it a great choice for applications that require quick rendering and minimal overhead. On the other hand, Vue.js is optimized for efficiency and offers excellent performance as well, but it has a larger file size compared to Preact. This means that Preact might be a better choice if performance is a critical factor for your project.
Learning Curve: When it comes to learning and using these libraries, Vue.js is generally considered to have a more gentle learning curve compared to Preact. Vue.js has a comprehensive documentation and a large community, which makes it easier for developers to get started and find support. Preact, although simpler in terms of codebase, might have a steeper learning curve due to its smaller community and fewer available resources.
Ecosystem: Vue.js has a larger ecosystem compared to Preact. It has a wide range of plugins and extensions that can enhance your development experience. Vue.js also has a more established community and a larger number of contributors, which means that there is a higher chance of finding solutions to common problems. On the other hand, Preact has a smaller ecosystem and fewer available extensions and plugins.
Size: Preact is known for its small size, with the minified version being around 10 KB. In comparison, Vue.js has a larger file size, with the minified version being around 80 KB. This could be a deciding factor if you are working on projects that require small file sizes and faster loading times.
React Compatibility: Preact is designed to be compatible with React, meaning that you can easily migrate React components to Preact without significant changes. This can be beneficial if you are already familiar with React and want to leverage your existing knowledge. Vue.js, on the other hand, has its own syntax and structure, which might require more effort to migrate React components.
Community Support: Vue.js has a larger community and a more active support system. It has a strong presence in the open-source community, which means that there are more resources, tutorials, and libraries available for Vue.js. Preact, although growing steadily, has a smaller community and might not have the same level of support and resources as Vue.js.

Preact vs Vue.js

Overview