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Rails vs React: What are the differences?

Introduction

React and Ruby on Rails (Rails) are two popular frameworks used for web development. While both have their own strengths and are used in different scenarios, there are several key differences between them.

  1. Language: One of the main differences between Rails and React is the programming language they are built on. Rails is a full-stack web application framework that uses Ruby as its primary programming language. React, on the other hand, is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

  2. Architecture: Rails follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, which separates the application into three components: the model, the view, and the controller. React, on the other hand, follows a component-based architecture, where the user interface is built from reusable components.

  3. Server-Side vs Client-Side Rendering: Rails is primarily server-side rendered, where most of the processing and rendering happen on the server before sending the final HTML to the client. React, on the other hand, is primarily client-side rendered, where the processing and rendering happen on the client-side using JavaScript.

  4. Learning Curve: Rails is known for its convention-over-configuration principle, which means that developers need to follow certain conventions to build a Rails application. React, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve as it requires knowledge of JavaScript and the React ecosystem.

  5. Community and Ecosystem: Rails has a large and mature community with a wide range of plugins, gems, and libraries available for various functionalities. React also has a growing community and a rich ecosystem of libraries and tools, but it may not be as extensive as Rails.

  6. Purpose: Rails is well-suited for building large-scale web applications with complex business logic. It provides a complete framework with built-in features for handling databases, routing, and authentication. React, on the other hand, is more focused on building interactive user interfaces and is commonly used in combination with other frameworks or technologies to build a full-stack application.

In summary, Rails and React have several key differences including the programming language used, architecture, rendering approach, learning curve, community and ecosystem, and their purpose in web development. Each framework has its own strengths and is suited for different scenarios.

Advice on Rails and React
Akshay Srivastava
Needs advice
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DigitalOceanDigitalOceanRailsRails
and
ReactReact

Hi there,

I'm looking to build up my own Auto Deployment tool for internal purposes (example deployhq.com, deploybot.com). I'm confused as to what tech stack I should use for the entire platform. My primary concerns are running parallel and concurrent builds to different targets (servers).

I have been researching and thinking of using Rails as backend and React as front-end (both deployhq.com and deploybot.com are built on these stacks).

Please advise.

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Replies (3)
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JenkinsJenkinsReactReact

Hi Akshay,

If the goal is to have a system that is purely to be used within your company, then it would be a good idea to have something scrappy. However, lot more has to be considered if you are planning to offer it as a SaaS or PaaS.

In either situations, the first factor I would consider is Return of Investment. You can build a really fabulous system, but if it is only going to help you little bit in the overall scheme of things, it may not be worth the effort. In other words, you can build - job management, scheduling, progress tracking, auto recovery, maintaining container state etc all by yourselves, but it may be worthwhile not reinventing the wheel when these solutions are already available (Jenkins or Team City for example).

If I were you, I will offload majority of the features like triggering jobs (build jobs), monitoring progress, errors etc to Jenkins. Every deployable unit can be dockerized, so that you get an uniform interface to validate whether the service is up and running.

You can build a thin vanilla UI on top of Jenkins' apis using React, or simply jQuery or Svelte. My personal preference would be Svelte.

If Jenkins is not a viable option, Go is the perfect backend for anything related to devops. You can use any Golang frameworks (Gin or Beego for instance) and have a front end in React / jQuery / Svelte. Hope this helps.

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Ben Clifford
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RailsRails

I guess the bigger question is why are you building your own auto deployment tool for internal use? Assuming that is a good idea, I think this depends on how quickly you can develop what you need in a language and framework that you are comfortable with, choose that over everything at this stage. You could build what you need using rails easily and anything that needs to run as a backend process for builds etc can be farmed out as a job somewhere and can be as simple of complex as you like. You can even have those jobs spooling up docker tasks with an entire rails stack in to to do what you need. In summary, have your front end create jobs with enough data in to go build stuff, then queue up those builds with something job like. The jobs can be simple rake tasks or entire docker containers doing anything you like. Perhaps take a look at rails, shoryuken for queueing on AWS, AWS Elastic Container service for actually doing the jobs.

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Ajay M
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RailsRails

I don't think you can achieve parallelism with rails as I know ruby also got GIL similar to python. I'd recommend going with system languages, I'd some luck with Go to auto deploy scrapy scrapers. Or try java even though it's slow compared to other system languages but it's robust.

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Max Loua
FullStack Dev at Nouvelles Donnes · | 3 upvotes · 362.7K views
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Rails APIRails API

Currently working on my company's new saas, the main goal is to manage content and user. I'm familiar with the rails framework and how it is easy to code and deploy. The thing is I'm the only dev on the project, and in terms of the tech stack, there is no preference. However, because Node.js is everywhere and there is enough dev on the market, I am stuck between choosing Rails or Node.js. I don't mind implementing Vue.js or React on the frontend, but I need a solid argument to explain to people that aren't necessarily tech-savvy as to why we should choose Rails over Nodejs.

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Replies (6)
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Node.jsNode.js

You are probably referring to ruby on rails for web development and nodejs for building the backend. Nodejs has frameworks such as express and next which not only provides a minimal code to build a backend but also gives the flexibility to try and experiment with the framework choices. For example you can have express framework + Passport for OAuth .... etc. The flexibility and the constant improvement of the language provides a good reason to opt for nodejs. Nodejs uses javascript which makes your code uniform when you are working full stack i.e react in front end and nodejs in backend.

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Rails APIRails API

I'd use the following metaphor to non-technical people. Rails is like a prepackaged toolkit, which can get most of the common tasks done fairly with ease. Whereas, node.js with whatever backend framekwork of choice, is like a DIY toolkit assembled by mix-and-match different tools in a large tool shop. Of course, at times DIY toolkit can do better on specific tasks. Given that you are the only dev on the project, I'd assume that the resource is fairly limited. And looks like you are not building some next-gen super duper fast smart application. So Just go with the prepackaged toolkit then. Rails is a very opinionated framework, there're pros and cons to it. But thanks to that, many of the gems are coded with it in mind. For example, they are all designed with same naming convention. Many will work well together out-of-box, for example devise and cancancan. Besides, many stuff are built in the framework. For example, logging utility, csrf protection, session encryption, etc. Yes, many of those stuff may not be useful or necessary at the beginning of the project life-cycle. However, down the road, there is a good chance you will need some of those. And the moment you realize that you already have it, it's so delightful. In addition, it's usually easier to debug a rails app than a node app in my experience. Personally, the cases where I would pick node.js over rails would be projects either require a) high-performance, or b) certain core functionality that has been implemented by some node packages but not by any ruby gems. In term of performance, node has a clear advantage over any other major web frameworks, except the ones built with go. It's simply a language feature. Node allows developer to easily write code that runs db query, external api calls, or other stuff of that nature in parallel. And that is THE MOST COMMON performance bottleneck of web applications.

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Dan Pickett
Co-Founder at Launch Academy · | 4 upvotes · 315.3K views
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Node.jsNode.js

I hate to admit it, because I loved my time with Rails (and I still love the framework), I have a hard time justifying new Rails applications these days. Core team has made some tragic design decisions, and developers just don't perceive it as being "cool" any more. The latter is a terrible metric for which to base a technology decision, but I think you'll find it more difficult to recruit additional engineers if you choose Ruby on Rails.

Without knowing too much of the details, Node/Express (ideally with Typescript) seems like a better solution here, given you'll be building out the front-end in Vue or React. It might be worth looking at NestJS, as it's the closest I've seen to a well-formed opinionated framework on the Node side of things. We're also fans of Objection ORM.

I hope that's helpful!

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Francisco Quintero
Tech Lead at Dev As Pros · | 4 upvotes · 315.7K views
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Rails APIRails API
at

Rails is currently a very mature and feature complete framework.

It's the ideal one if you're the only dev for your project because you get so many things already baked-in the framework that you'd only need to deeply care about specific stuff.

I won't say any NodeJS framework isn't good enough but in my experience with NodeJS frameworks you have to code a lot of the things Rails already provides. There's many people in Twitter and IRL asking for a "Rails for JavaScript" framework.

And you know? In the early stages of any project we have to validate it first with real users/customers. With Rails you can get to production real quick and fast.

I'm going to mention some of the features you get from day 1 when you run rails new app_name:

  • File uploading with Active Storage
  • Rich text editor with Action Text
  • Emailing with Action Mailer
  • ORM, migrations, validations with Active Record
  • Web sockets with Action Cable
  • Internationalization
  • Modern frontend stuff with Webpacker

and more.

The JavaScript community is on its moment, growing and gathering more people everyday but the Rails community is also a big one and there's always going to be a Rails developer to hire whenever you're ready to hire someone.

I suggest you to go with Rails because is a good choice, gives you less things to worry about and it's a very good and mature framework.

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Jean-Pierre Pommet
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React on RailsReact on Rails

I need a solid argument to explain to people that aren't necessarily tech-savvy as to why we should choose Rails over Nodejs

Hi Max, it sounds like that you are proficient in both stacks and probably have a higher expertise in Rails (correct me if I am wrong) and since you are the only dev on a project, a good argument that comes to mind is probably the velocity and maturity (enterprise grade, battle tested in production) that Rails provide with proven success stories in the tech industry such as Airbnb, Stripes, Shopify to name a few. You can also make the argument that Rails is great to run the backend and React+Vue (and nodejs for tooling) is ideal for the front-end development (see or find companies example that use both). You can also build and show a prototype using both and share your experience which could help you find and forge the selling points to those non tech savvy folks, why not.

Eventually, are you going to have other developers on your project? if yes then you will need to take in account, onboarding and ramp up to contribution time when they are hired.

IMHO, I am not a fan of the debate Rails vs Nodejs, they are just tools at the disposal of the developer it's just a matter of figuring out what makes the most sense.

Let me know if you wanna discuss further, happy to help out!

ps: markdown preview on stack share... no good.

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Rails APIRails API

Rails has advantages over node.js (specifically express) when working a more complicated backend. While Express has some speed advantages to Rails, this is mitigated if your software is more CPU intensive.

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Needs advice
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AngularJSAngularJSReactReact
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Vue.jsVue.js

What is the best MVC stack to build mobile-friendly, light-weight, and fast single-page application with Spring Boot as back-end (Java)? Is Bootstrap still required to front-end layer these days?

The idea is to host on-premise initially with the potential to move to the cloud. Which combo would have minimal developer ramp-up time and low long-term maintenance costs (BAU support)?

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Replies (3)
Carolyne Stopa
Full Stack Developer at Contabilizei · | 10 upvotes · 557.1K views
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Vue.jsVue.js

React might be a good option if you're considering a mobile app for the future, because of react native. Although, Vue.js has the easiest learning curve and offers a better developer ramp-up time. Vue.js is great to build SPAs, very clean and organized and you won't have a lot of long-term maintenance problems (like AngularJS, for example). Bootstrap can still be used, but with flexbox there's no need anymore.

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Chaitanya Chunduri
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ReactReact

I recommend React because of less memory occupant compare to Angular, but this will depend on your organisation flexibility. When you use React you need to import different libraries as per your need. On the other side angular is a complete framework.

Performance-wise I vote for react js as it loads up quickly and lighter on the mobile. You can make good PWA with SSR as well.

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ReactReact

If you are new to all three react will be a good choice considering, react-native will be useful if you want to build cross platform mobile application today or tomorrow. If you are talking about bootstrap styling framework than it's a choice you can style ur components by ur self or use bootstrap 4.0 framework. The complete stack mentioned above is platform agnostic u can run it anywhere you want be it cloud or on-premise.

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Shivam Bhargava
AVP - Business at VAYUZ Technologies Pvt. Ltd. · | 22 upvotes · 681.3K views
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Node.jsNode.jsPythonPython
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RailsRails

Hi Community! Trust everyone is keeping safe. I am exploring the idea of building a #Neobank (App) with end-to-end banking capabilities. In the process of exploring this space, I have come across multiple Apps (N26, Revolut, Monese, etc) and explored their stacks in detail. The confusion remains to be the Backend Tech to be used?

What would you go with considering all of the languages such as Node.js Java Rails Python are suggested by some person or the other. As a general trend, I have noticed the usage of Node with React on the front or Node with a combination of Kotlin and Swift. Please suggest what would be the right approach!

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Replies (9)
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ServerlessServerless

Use the language which works well for the developers you have or have available. If you're starting, building a first iteration is far more important than worrying about what language might be best to solve a problem you may never have.

When hiring, look for developers, not "node developers" or "java developers" having people who recognise and are willing to adapt means you can have the flexibility you will need to solve as-yet unforeseen issues. Hire people who are wed to a specific language and you will be bound to that language, regardless of whether it's most appropriate or not.

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RailsRails

For online banking, it'll be less computation intensive and more data intensive. So, Rails will be better than Python. I'll not recommend Node.js as it's not as scalable as those. If I had to choose indepently I would took Go.

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Node.jsNode.js

Typescript reduces many errors and makes potentially big app more maintainable. For banking app typed language is must have, so if not node than it could be anything typed, but not python or ruby. Also you can search benchmarks by yourself - ruby is the slowest language in the world, python comes next, javascript is on top of interpreted languages by speed.

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Varun Sharma
CTO at Nugen Computer & I.T. Services · | 5 upvotes · 127.4K views

HI Shivam, If you the only person who is going to develop the full application then I will suggest you to go for Node.js because you will have to deal with one language only i.e. Javascript. And if you are thinking about scaling then do not worry. Nodejs with mongodb make good application. Capital One bank, Paypal, Linkedin and so on companies shifted themselves to Nodejs. Even if you go for Ruby, it has GVL which again makes it work in single thead. If you want to manage concurrent requests in Ruby then you have to manage by introducing Rubinius/jRuby. If we talk about the deployment of Nodejs, it require less resources as compare to other. I have deployed inventory solution right now using Reactjs with Node.js stack and it is pretty much good. I have also deployed apps in Ruby as well. However, node is fast as compare to Ruby and you can scale it easily. I am not saying Ruby is bad. I work in Ruby as I told you above. But these are the real facts.

You can checkout this link :- https://softwarebrothers.co/blog/companies-that-use-node-js/

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John Akhilomen
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PythonPython

Since it's a banking app, I'd advice you go with Python for the backend because of the data analysis you'd be doing in your app. I see you doing some data analysis since it's a banking app. Python is a powerful language for data analysis. And for web, yes I'd advice Node with React, and for mobile, Node with a combination of Kotlin and Swift. Don't even try going hybrid for this kind of application. It's best going native.

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Amit Mor
Software Architect at Payoneer · | 3 upvotes · 127K views
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JavaJava

As others mentioned, the problem domain is around data. From my experience, data means strongly typed entities. It might be good however to start off with a dynamic language such as Python (with Django) just to build a prototype, but once the models have been proved to be valid I'd go with statically typed language such as java/Go (I prefer Go but that's a whole different conversation) as you get compile time guarantees for type safety.

An alternative (or addition) to all of the above is the use of 'strong protocols', such as Protocol Buffers, Avro, Thrift and the likes. In this case you get type safety and stability between communicating backend services, while deciding and changing on whatever backend service language you want. That goes to say that your problem is not related to programming language decision but to a much profound understanding of what's important for the business to be created and be valuable.

As a general note, I don't think you should go, if you've got commercial aspirations, with any language that you'd have hard recruiting people who actually know what their doing. In Israel it would mean take Kotlin out of the equation

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Chris Capistran
Software Engineer at Ultra Mobile · | 3 upvotes · 127K views
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Node.jsNode.js

The reason why companies are switching to nodeJS is because it unifies all development under a single language.

If you are a one man team you can start developing anywhere on the stack without the overhead of switching languages at each layer. If you have a large team, your DBAs, your core service team, your application team can all read each others code.

You can build a serverless backend using nodeJS and cloud services( AWS, Azure, etc.) that is extremely scalable. A front end framework (ReactJS(Web/mobile), ReactNativeJS(mobile optimized) all in Javascript. If you need to optimize performance for mobile further you can contract an iOS Developer to build in Swift or an Android developer to build it Kotlin and give them keys to use your nodeJS apis.

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You should not go with react,kotlin and swift those are very colourful languages but java ,node.js etc are colourful yet they have depth. You should only go with kotlin if you want to use android studio it is highly compatible. So its your choice . May you choose the best

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Jay Rathod
Software Developer at Software Development & Design Services · | 1 upvotes · 127K views
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Node.jsNode.js

node is convenient.

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Vue.jsVue.jsMoment.jsMoment.js
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ReactReact

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...

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ReactReact

In my view, the upside of React is you're likely to find more existing, robust design systems (e.g. sets of components containing anything from buttons to datepickers) in the React ecosystem than Vue. UI frameworks aside, momentjs comes in when you want operate on the date(times) you get back from whatever datepicker you choose (e.g. date formatting, date match).

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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?

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Replies (16)
Johnny Bell
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on
ReactReact

I've used both Vue.js and React and I would stick with React. I know that Vue.js seems easier to write and its much faster to pick up however as you mentioned above React has way more ready made components you can just plugin, and the community for React is very big.

It might be a bit more of a steep learning curve for your friend to learn React over Vue.js but I think in the long run its the better option.

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Thomas LEVEIL
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Vue.jsVue.js

I chose to use Vue.js a few years ago mainly for the easy learning curve. I have no experience with React, so I won't make any comparison here. Regarding available components, I never felt locked in because of Vue when looking for components. It happens that a component I wish to use is not available as a Vue component (and nobody published any Vue wrapper for it), but in such cases I was able to quickly hack a Vue wrapper component. In the end I don't think a decision to choose one framework over another should be made solely because of the number of components available. (And not all components in either framework is maintained, bug free, documented or easy to use)

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ReactReact

I would also go with React. The learning curve can be a little more difficult but as soon as you got the concepts it's really easy to create things. As everybody has mentioned the React community is huge and it keeps growing, anything you may need for your project there are super high probabilities that you will find it.

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Oguzhan Cetin
Senior Developer at Melantis · | 5 upvotes · 340.6K views
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ReactReact

React is great, Vue.js is also great. But I'm personally using React, because React is changing the way I look at how JavaScript should be. This is a really big plus for me. Vue is good, but it's just another alternative. Also, too many big companies are using React, that means you can trust it for big projects.

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Ben Shichman
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ReactReact

I'd have to concur that I'd advise React. In addition to the reasons mentioned, the developer pool is significantly larger (and also slightly more expensive) for React. In time, engineering costs will even out as more and more teams adopt it. The community support is fantastic, and the available components significant.

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Michael R.
Full-Stack Web Developer at STHCoders · | 3 upvotes · 339.6K views
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on
ReactReact

Anything that interacts with the Internet, websites, applications, etc., while it may be more complex to build, will be easier to maintain in the long run. React offers more flexibility, a much larger support base for knowledge and opinion, and is just as stable asVue.

To make the best comparison in my opinion, think of React as the Android OS and Vue more like iOS. While Vue may be advantageous in some cases, it is limited by constricting parameters. On the other hand, while React may be more complex and incorporate more open-source/third-party constructs, it is supported by over 50,000 npm packages and allows for the use of JSX. Which I might add, once learned, becomes second nature to employ and offers more flexibility.

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at

Both have their pro's and con's; however to agree what has been mentioned here before; Using Vue.js will be easier as it's learning curve isn't steep; plus learning Vue.js will teach you fundamentals which (in a sense) can be applied to React as well. Community support for React is indeed very big, but Vue.js is also still growing. Component wise, I wouldn't worry to much about that, writing your own components is also a good tool for learning a language.

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Vue.jsVue.js

Would start with Vue especially if you want to progress more quickly and don't want/need to spend time learning React just for the sake of it. You can always pick up React later if necessary. I would caution about using "more readily available React components" just because they exist.

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Mark Scott
Personal Development at Mark Scott · | 3 upvotes · 341K views
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Vue.jsVue.js

Having developed in both Vue.js and React, I agree with your assessment of Vue. It does feel light and easier to understand and therefore learn. Seeing that Vue has some genetic roots with React, I would say start your friend out on Vue. If they need to learn React later, that should give them a good foundation. If you have a Pluralsight subscription, look for my course on Vue.js and feel free to use the demo project as a starting point.

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Rajeev Borborah
Vice President Technology at WebMD · | 1 upvotes · 339.4K views
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on
Vue.jsVue.js

We did a comparison between React, Vue and Angular and while found each capable of supporting our needs, we ended up using VueJS because of its ease of use, the ability to use templates, large and growing community and good documentation. After developing on it for a around 4 months we re-evaluated and agreed that we had made the right choice and continue to migrate our products/platform to it.

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ReactReact

It is hard to say which is good. I've used both. Vue is easier. But I feel more comfortable with React. That is why I chose React.

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on
Vue.jsVue.js

VueJS hands down. Which components do you need? Have a look at Vuetify, mature project, plenty of components ready to plug and play. If on the other side you need more customization, have a look at tailwindcss. VueJS is much cleaner and IMO will overtake React soon. It's simply a better React.

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on
ReactReact

Virtual dom and JSX. Vue is just a baby to the race. React has it's mobile platform version as react native . so it would be easy for you and you wont reinvent the wheel again for mobile apps.

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Recommends
on
ReactReact

It all depends. Vue.js is smaller, and from what I saw (benchmarks) faster. It's also slightly more intuitive and easier to grasp. React is more popular, and the adoption rate is much higher.

Again, it all depends.

If I may, my personal choice would perhaps be either React or Svelte.

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ReactReactVue.jsVue.js

I would recommend both of them since Vue is a UI library and helps you to design beautiful website while react allows you to handle backend problems like comment management and onspot reloading more efficiently also react includes useState and react is a framework while vue is a library

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S Milliken
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Vue.jsVue.js

As others have stated there are more canned components available for React, but your observation about it's complexity is an important one. There are architectural aspects of Vue.js that lead to cleaner more concise solutions. As React apps get bigger they become a little unwieldy. Depending on your requirements you need to weigh those competing concerns. Our team is using React, but I am beginning to question that choice as time goes on. Another consideration is that Vue.js is becoming more mature as we speak. Also as others join the project, react developers should be productive in Vue.js within days. Just my 2 cents...

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Decisions about Rails and React

I have created an app with react(context-api) on front-end and ruby on rails on the back-end by using chakraUI and Formik libraries. It is actually fun to use these different stacks combinations.

Have a look at it and let me know about your thoughts.

Demo: https://blog-frontend-react.herokuapp.com/

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Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 10 upvotes · 610.8K views

It was easier to find people who've worked on React than Vue. Angular did not have this problem, but seemed way too bloated compared to React. Angular also brings in restrictions working within their MVC framework. React on the other hand only handles the view/rendering part and rest of the control is left to the developers. React has a very active community, support and has lots of ready-to-use plugins/libraries available.

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José Oberto
Head of Engineering & Development at Chiper · | 14 upvotes · 530.6K views

It is a very versatile library that provides great development speed. Although, with a bad organization, maintaining projects can be a disaster. With a good architecture, this does not happen.

Angular is obviously powerful and robust. I do not rule it out for any future application, in fact with the arrival of micro frontends and cross-functional teams I think it could be useful. However, if I have to build a stack from scratch again, I'm left with react.

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Chose
RailsRails
over
DjangoDjango

I have used both the tools . Both of them are super awesome , very reliable and their learning curve is also super easy. But, the reason I choose Ruby on Rails over Django is the fact that the dependency injection is super easy in Rails than Django. What I mean is the fact that, Django requires a lot of import statement to do a lot of work, which remembering is not so easy and even after that you may need to write a lot of code. But Ruby on Rails uses gem to add addition feature or dependency in the project. Which requires just copying the gem statement from github and pasting it in the Gemfile, then running bundle install(these days just bundle works super fine). And there you are with the new feature in your app. You can see this with the example of Authentication, where in Django you require several steps like adding class based views and many more, but in rails it's just as easy as installing the 'devise' gem . And if you want to make it beautiful use bootstrap_template gem to make it look prettier. Now with Rails 6 , Rails is a total developer's fervent friend because it has come up with features like Action Mail and Action Text.

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Valeriy Bykanov
Founder, CEO at X1 Group · | 4 upvotes · 399.6K views

Working on a new SaaS web/mobile app and ended up with React as our choice of Frontend JavaScript framework for SPA web version with React Native for iOS, Android, Windows clients.

The key takeaways:

  • Both frameworks can do the job quite well for us. This might be true for the majority of utility web apps being built out there as well, so there was no "wrong" decision here.

  • Vue is often cited as easier to learn and code on. But only in case your engineers never worked with either Vue or React and start learning them from scratch. In our case, we knew we'll be hiring engineers who already have experience in the framework we'll select - so it was not a big argument for Vue.

  • We're building our engineering team in Ukraine and realised we have 3(!) times more engineers with React experience on the market than having Vue experience.

  • Mobile - React Native, despite being a different framework, still shares a lot with React and it's just easier for React developers to start using React Native in days.

The strongest points for our decision:

  • React community is larger, means more/faster answers to your questions and existing components.

  • Way more experienced React engineers on the market.

  • React + React Native is a great combo if you're building web and mobile clients of the same app.

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John Clifford de Vera
Software Engineer at CircleYY · | 21 upvotes · 399.5K views

I used React not just because it is more popular than Angular. But the declarative and composition it gives out of the box is fascinating and React.js is just a very small UI library and you can build anything on top of it.

Composing components is the strongest asset of React for me as it can breakdown your application into smaller pieces which makes it easy to reuse and scale.

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Máté Homolya
Senior developer at Self-employed · | 11 upvotes · 271.3K views
Migrated
from
ReactReact
to
SvelteSvelte

Svelte is everything a developer could ever want for flexible, scalable frontend development. I feel like React has reached a maturity level where there needs to be new syntactic sugar added (I'm looking at you, hooks!). I love how Svelte sets out to rebuild a new language to write interfaces in from the ground up.

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Since I came from python I had two choices: #django or #flask. It felt like it was a better idea to go for #django considering I was building a blogging platform, this is kind of what #django was made for. On the other hand, #rails seems to be a fantastic framework to get things done. Although I do not regret any of my time spent on developing with #django I want to give #rails a try some day in the future for the sake of curiosity.

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As a small team, we wanted to pick the framework which allowed us to move quickly. There's no option better than Rails. Not having to solve the fundamentals means we can more quickly build our feature set. No other framework can beat ActiveRecord in terms of integration & ease-of use. To top it all of, there's a lot of attention paid to security in the framework, making almost everything safe-by-default.

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Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 23 upvotes · 4.7M views

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

  • Nuxt.js consisting of Vue CLI, Vue Router, vuex, Webpack and Sass (Bundler for HTML5, CSS 3), Babel (Transpiler for JavaScript),
  • Vue Styleguidist as our style guide and pool of developed Vue.js components
  • Vuetify as Material Component Framework (for fast app development)
  • TypeScript as programming language
  • Apollo / GraphQL (incl. GraphiQL) for data access layer (https://apollo.vuejs.org/)
  • ESLint, TSLint and Prettier for coding style and code analyzes
  • Jest as testing framework
  • Google Fonts and Font Awesome for typography and icon toolkit
  • NativeScript-Vue 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.
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Pros of Rails
Pros of React
  • 856
    Rapid development
  • 652
    Great gems
  • 606
    Great community
  • 484
    Convention over configuration
  • 417
    Mvc
  • 348
    Great for web
  • 343
    Beautiful code
  • 310
    Open source
  • 270
    Great libraries
  • 261
    Active record
  • 108
    Elegant
  • 90
    Easy to learn
  • 88
    Easy Database Migrations
  • 82
    Makes you happy
  • 75
    Free
  • 62
    Great routing
  • 54
    Has everything you need to get the job done
  • 41
    Great Data Modeling
  • 38
    MVC - Easy to start on
  • 38
    Beautiful
  • 35
    Easy setup
  • 26
    Great caching
  • 25
    Ultra rapid development time
  • 22
    It's super easy
  • 17
    Great Resources
  • 16
    Easy to build mockups that work
  • 14
    Less Boilerplate
  • 7
    Developer Friendly
  • 7
    API Development
  • 6
    Great documentation
  • 5
    Easy REST API creation
  • 5
    Quick
  • 4
    Intuitive
  • 4
    Great language
  • 4
    Haml and sass
  • 4
    Easy to learn, use, improvise and update
  • 2
    Metaprogramming
  • 2
    It works
  • 2
    Jet packs come standard
  • 2
    Easy and fast
  • 2
    Legacy
  • 1
    It's intuitive
  • 1
    Convention over configuration
  • 1
    Easy Testing
  • 1
    Cancan
  • 828
    Components
  • 672
    Virtual dom
  • 578
    Performance
  • 506
    Simplicity
  • 442
    Composable
  • 185
    Data flow
  • 166
    Declarative
  • 127
    Isn't an mvc framework
  • 119
    Reactive updates
  • 115
    Explicit app state
  • 49
    JSX
  • 29
    Learn once, write everywhere
  • 22
    Easy to Use
  • 21
    Uni-directional data flow
  • 17
    Works great with Flux Architecture
  • 11
    Great perfomance
  • 10
    Javascript
  • 9
    Built by Facebook
  • 8
    TypeScript support
  • 6
    Server Side Rendering
  • 6
    Speed
  • 5
    Feels like the 90s
  • 5
    Excellent Documentation
  • 5
    Props
  • 5
    Functional
  • 5
    Easy as Lego
  • 5
    Closer to standard JavaScript and HTML than others
  • 5
    Cross-platform
  • 5
    Easy to start
  • 5
    Hooks
  • 5
    Awesome
  • 5
    Scalable
  • 4
    Super easy
  • 4
    Allows creating single page applications
  • 4
    Server side views
  • 4
    Sdfsdfsdf
  • 4
    Start simple
  • 4
    Strong Community
  • 4
    Fancy third party tools
  • 4
    Scales super well
  • 3
    Has arrow functions
  • 3
    Beautiful and Neat Component Management
  • 3
    Just the View of MVC
  • 3
    Simple, easy to reason about and makes you productive
  • 3
    Fast evolving
  • 3
    SSR
  • 3
    Great migration pathway for older systems
  • 3
    Rich ecosystem
  • 3
    Simple
  • 3
    Has functional components
  • 3
    Every decision architecture wise makes sense
  • 3
    Very gentle learning curve
  • 2
    Split your UI into components with one true state
  • 2
    Recharts
  • 2
    Permissively-licensed
  • 2
    Fragments
  • 2
    Sharable
  • 2
    Image upload
  • 2
    HTML-like
  • 1
    React hooks
  • 1
    Datatables

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Cons of Rails
Cons of React
  • 24
    Too much "magic" (hidden behavior)
  • 14
    Poor raw performance
  • 12
    Asset system is too primitive and outdated
  • 6
    Heavy use of mixins
  • 6
    Bloat in models
  • 4
    Very Very slow
  • 40
    Requires discipline to keep architecture organized
  • 29
    No predefined way to structure your app
  • 28
    Need to be familiar with lots of third party packages
  • 13
    JSX
  • 10
    Not enterprise friendly
  • 6
    One-way binding only
  • 3
    State consistency with backend neglected
  • 3
    Bad Documentation
  • 2
    Error boundary is needed
  • 2
    Paradigms change too fast

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What is Rails?

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

What is 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.

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What are some alternatives to Rails and React?
Django
Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.
Ruby
Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.
Sinatra
Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort.
Laravel
It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.
Node.js
Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.
See all alternatives