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  1. Stackups
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  3. UI Components
  4. Javascript UI Libraries
  5. Preact vs React

Preact vs React

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

React
React
Stacks182.6K
Followers147.0K
Votes4.1K
GitHub Stars240.3K
Forks49.7K
Preact
Preact
Stacks1.1K
Followers292
Votes28

Preact vs React: What are the differences?

Preact is a lightweight alternative to React, optimized for performance and size, while React is a widely adopted JavaScript library with extensive features and community support. Here are the key differences between Preact and React:

  1. Size and Footprint: Preact is a lightweight alternative to React having a smaller file size and a faster runtime. Preact focuses on essential features and aims to provide a similar API to React while being more lightweight. This smaller footprint can be beneficial for applications where file size and performance optimization are critical factors.

  2. Performance: Preact excels in speed and efficient rendering with its minimal virtual DOM diffing and optimized component updates, leading to faster rendering and improved app responsiveness. React, on the other hand, provides a more feature-rich virtual DOM implementation, which can be advantageous for complex applications with a large number of components.

  3. Compatibility: Preact is designed to be a drop-in replacement for React and aims for maximum compatibility with React APIs and components. However, some React features or less commonly used APIs might not be fully supported in Preact, which can impact compatibility in certain cases. React has a larger ecosystem with extensive community support and a wide range of libraries and tools available.

  4. Features and Ecosystem: Preact focuses on the core functionalities of React and does not include some advanced features like React's context API or error boundaries. However, Preact offers a plugin system that allows developers to extend its functionality and add additional features as needed. React has a rich ecosystem with an abundance of third-party libraries, tooling, and community support.

In summary, Preact has a smaller size and faster runtime, making it suitable for applications where file size and performance optimizations are critical. React, on the other hand, provides a more feature-rich virtual DOM implementation and has a larger ecosystem for complex applications.

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Advice on React, Preact

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
Simon
Simon

Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH

Apr 22, 2020

DecidedonVuetifyVuetifyVue.jsVue.jsNuxt.jsNuxt.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
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

React
React
Preact
Preact

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.

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).

Declarative; Component-based; Learn once, write anywhere
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
240.3K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
49.7K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
182.6K
Stacks
1.1K
Followers
147.0K
Followers
292
Votes
4.1K
Votes
28
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
  • 15
    Lightweight
  • 5
    Drop-in replacement for React
  • 4
    Performance
  • 3
    Props/state passed to render
  • 1
    ES6 class components

What are some alternatives to React, Preact?

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.

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.

Flux

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.

Famo.us

Famo.us

Famo.us is a free and open source JavaScript platform for building mobile apps and desktop experiences. What makes Famo.us unique is its JavaScript rendering engine and 3D physics engine that gives developers the power and tools to build native quality apps and animations using pure JavaScript.

Riot

Riot

Riot brings custom tags to all browsers. Think React + Polymer but with enjoyable syntax and a small learning curve.

Marko

Marko

Marko is a really fast and lightweight HTML-based templating engine that compiles templates to readable Node.js-compatible JavaScript modules, and it works on the server and in the browser. It supports streaming, async rendering and custom tags.

Kendo UI

Kendo UI

Fast, light, complete: 70+ jQuery-based UI widgets in one powerful toolset. AngularJS integration, Bootstrap support, mobile controls, offline data solution.

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