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  1. Stackups
  2. Business Tools
  3. UI Components
  4. Javascript UI Libraries
  5. Bootstrap vs React

Bootstrap vs React

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

React
React
Stacks182.6K
Followers147.0K
Votes4.1K
GitHub Stars240.3K
Forks49.7K
Bootstrap
Bootstrap
Stacks57.4K
Followers13.2K
Votes7.7K
GitHub Stars173.6K
Forks79.2K

Bootstrap vs React: What are the differences?

  1. Key Difference 1: Core Functionality - Bootstrap is a CSS framework that provides ready-to-use components and styling options, while React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. Bootstrap focuses on providing a responsive design system, grid layout, and prebuilt components like buttons and forms, making it easy to create a visually appealing website. React, on the other hand, focuses on creating reusable UI components, managing component state, and handling the rendering of those components efficiently.

  2. Key Difference 2: Dependency - Bootstrap is dependent on jQuery and JavaScript for its interactive components and functionality. It requires both these dependencies to be included in the project. In contrast, React is independent of any external dependencies and does not require jQuery or any other additional libraries. This makes React a lightweight and standalone solution, reducing the overall size and complexity of the project.

  3. Key Difference 3: DOM Manipulation - Bootstrap primarily focuses on DOM manipulation and modifying the existing HTML structure using CSS classes and JavaScript. It enhances the interactivity and appearance of the website by adding or removing classes and manipulating the DOM. React, on the other hand, follows a virtual DOM approach, which means it creates a virtual representation of the actual DOM and updates only the necessary parts when the state or props of a component change. This results in better performance and improved efficiency.

  4. Key Difference 4: Reusability and Component-Based Architecture - React is built around the concept of reusable components. These components are modular and can be composed together to create complex UI structures. They can also be reused across projects, resulting in improved code maintainability and reusability. Bootstrap provides prebuilt components and styles, but they are not as granular and customizable as React components. React components can be customized and extended to match specific design requirements, and they offer greater flexibility in terms of functionality and styling.

  5. Key Difference 5: Development Workflow - Bootstrap follows a traditional web development workflow where the focus is on writing HTML and CSS code. It provides prebuilt classes and styles that can be applied directly to HTML elements. React, on the other hand, introduces a component-centric development workflow. Developers define reusable and modular components using JavaScript and JSX syntax, which ultimately get rendered as HTML and CSS. This workflow encourages a more organized and scalable approach to development, and it enables easier collaboration between frontend and backend developers.

  6. Key Difference 6: Learning Curve - Bootstrap is relatively easy to learn, especially for developers with a basic understanding of HTML and CSS. It provides clear documentation and examples that make it straightforward to implement. React, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve, especially for developers who are new to JavaScript frameworks. It requires a solid understanding of JavaScript, JSX syntax, and component-based architecture. However, once mastered, React offers greater flexibility and scalability in building complex and interactive web applications.

In Summary, Bootstrap is a CSS framework for creating visually appealing websites with prebuilt components and responsive design, while React is a JavaScript library for building reusable UI components and managing state efficiently, following a component-based architecture. Bootstrap relies on jQuery and JavaScript for interactivity, while React is independent of external dependencies. React follows a virtual DOM approach and offers better reusability, customizability, and development workflow, at the cost of a steeper learning curve.

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Advice on React, Bootstrap

Cyrus
Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs adviceonVue.jsVue.jsReactReact

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
Cyrus
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
Damiano
Damiano

Oct 27, 2019

Decided

Preact offers an API which is extremely similar to React's for less than 10% of its size (and createElement is renamed to h, which makes the overall bundle a lot smaller). Although it is less compatible with other libraries than the latter (and its ecosystem is nowhere as developed), this is generally not a problem as Preact exposes the preact/compat API, which can be used as an alias both for React and ReactDOM and allows for the use of libraries which would otherwise just be compatible with React.

25.6k views25.6k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

React
React
Bootstrap
Bootstrap

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.

Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.

Declarative; Component-based; Learn once, write anywhere
Preprocessors: Bootstrap ships with vanilla CSS, but its source code utilizes the two most popular CSS preprocessors, Less and Sass. Quickly get started with precompiled CSS or build on the source.;One framework, every device: Bootstrap easily and efficiently scales your websites and applications with a single code base, from phones to tablets to desktops with CSS media queries.;Full of features: With Bootstrap, you get extensive and beautiful documentation for common HTML elements, dozens of custom HTML and CSS components, and awesome jQuery plugins.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
240.3K
GitHub Stars
173.6K
GitHub Forks
49.7K
GitHub Forks
79.2K
Stacks
182.6K
Stacks
57.4K
Followers
147.0K
Followers
13.2K
Votes
4.1K
Votes
7.7K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 837
    Components
  • 674
    Virtual dom
  • 579
    Performance
  • 509
    Simplicity
  • 442
    Composable
Cons
  • 41
    Requires discipline to keep architecture organized
  • 30
    No predefined way to structure your app
  • 29
    Need to be familiar with lots of third party packages
  • 13
    JSX
  • 10
    Not enterprise friendly
Pros
  • 1582
    Responsiveness
  • 1193
    UI components
  • 943
    Consistent
  • 779
    Great docs
  • 677
    Flexible
Cons
  • 26
    Javascript is tied to jquery
  • 16
    Every site uses the defaults
  • 15
    Grid system break points aren't ideal
  • 14
    Too much heavy decoration in default look
  • 8
    Verbose styles

What are some alternatives to React, Bootstrap?

jQuery

jQuery

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

AngularJS

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.

Vue.js

Vue.js

It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.

jQuery UI

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.

Foundation

Foundation

Foundation is the most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world. You can quickly prototype and build sites or apps that work on any kind of device with Foundation, which includes layout constructs (like a fully responsive grid), elements and best practices.

Semantic UI

Semantic UI

Semantic empowers designers and developers by creating a shared vocabulary for UI.

Materialize

Materialize

A CSS Framework based on material design.

Material Design for Angular

Material Design for Angular

Material Design is a specification for a unified system of visual, motion, and interaction design that adapts across different devices. Our goal is to deliver a lean, lightweight set of AngularJS-native UI elements that implement the material design system for use in Angular SPAs.

Svelte

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.

Material-UI

Material-UI

Material UI is a library of React UI components that implements Google's Material Design.

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