Vue vs Angular: Which One is the Better Framework?

Quick Summary: With the rapid evolution of frontend frameworks, the decision of choosing the right one becomes quite difficult. Vue.js vs Angular is one of those difficult choices. Making a selection between these frameworks isn’t easy as they offer their own strengths and weaknesses. This blog aims to help you come out of this confusion by providing a fair comparison of these frameworks. Keep reading to make a sound decision for your frontend project.

Choosing the proper framework is an essential step when developing web applications. However, choices are vast for every CTO or project manager. Indeed, many web frameworks today have various features and benefits, which poses a difficult conundrum for them.

One of the dilemmas that CTOs and project managers face is deciding between – Angular vs VueJS. These are the two powerful frameworks for developing frontend solutions. But when it comes to choosing between them, it's a Herculean task.

Well, looking at some facts and figures, there are currently more than 1,559,243 successful websites that use Vue globally. On the other hand, Angular is used by only a limited number of websites, predominantly by those with heavy traffic demands. However, a full-blown comparison of these frameworks can provide some grounds for deciding. Understanding the differences between them and the strengths and weaknesses of each of these frameworks will enable you to make an informed decision.

In this article, let's compare and find out which option is the right for your project – VueJS vs Angular.

VueJS vs Angular: A Quick Understanding of Each Framework

Angular is a heavy-weight frontend web framework built to create complex web applications. It offers a robust structure for building web applications and is suitable for creating SPAs, real-time applications, e-commerce applications, and more.

VueJS offers a more flexible modular structure and is best suited to developing lightweight single-page applications. It offers many unique features like computed properties, watchers, and Virtual DOM that are powerful and cannot be found in Angular.

Let’s learn more about each of these frameworks with brief introductions as follows:

A Quick Sketch of VueJS

VueJS is a rapidly growing JavaScript framework with many unique features. As developers call it, it is a performant, approachable, and versatile JS framework. It offers a compiler-optimized and truly reactive rendering system that boosts performance.

The Vue framework is easy for those with experience in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as it allows you to build on top of these technologies. With intuitive syntax and HTML-like templates, grasping the core concepts of this JS framework is quick and convenient.

As a versatile JS framework, Vue can also be used as a library for any existing web development tech stack. It seamlessly integrates with other frameworks and libraries to build complex web applications.

Notable Features of VueJS

• It offers Virtual DOM that helps in speed optimization and faster implementation of changes.
• It allows reusable components that enhance development time and process.
• The “v-on” attribute can be added to DOM elements to listen for events.
• Built-in transition components help to create nice transition effects.

Popular Web Apps Built with Vue

• Gitlab
• Behance
• Grammarly
• Font Awesome
• Adobe
• Habitica

Advantages of VueJS

1. It has a gentler learning curve, making beginners grasp its concepts quickly.
2. As one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks, it positively impacts SEO and UX.
3. The data binding options, and reactivity system help build truly dynamic applications.
4. As it relies on standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, it seamlessly integrates with existing applications.

Disadvantages of VueJS

1. There is not enough support to create large-scale applications with Vue.
2. A significant content of this framework is in Chinese, which creates a language barrier.
3. Lack of financial support for large-scale development projects.
4. Difficulties with two-way binding and mobile support.

Use Cases of Vue

• Existing application functionality extension
• ⁠Existing application design extension
• ⁠Large scale enterprise apps
• ⁠Small project applications
• ⁠Single-page apps
• ⁠Progressive web apps

A Snapshot of Angular

When it comes to web development, many developers prefer using Angular framework. It is a robust JavaScript framework backed by Google. It has built-in libraries and tools that help in creating scalable and feature-rich applications.

Angular is among the most popular web frameworks based on the TypeScript programming language. Its component-based coding, dependency injection, two-way data binding, and other features make it a powerful framework to build robust web solutions.

Two-way data binding offers automatic synchronization between the data and the model. Plus, integrated testing makes it possible to build and deliver efficient and bug-free applications. Angular CLI accelerates and simplifies the process of developing, testing, and deploying applications.

Moreover, Angular is a complete rewrite of the AngularJS framework that existed before it. This transition brought new changes in the framework including the replacement of JavaScript with TypeScript and many other features.

Due to many differences between Angular and AngularJS, they are now two separate frameworks.

Notable Features of Angular

• It offers a command-line interface that expedites development.
• The data binding it offers helps add dynamic behavior to web pages.
• Dependency injection feature with Angular simplifies dependency handling.
• It helps create advanced animations for UIs without lengthy code.

Popular Web Apps Built with Angular

• Forbes
• Gmail
• PayPal
• Google
• Upwork
• Microsoft Office

Advantages of Angular

1. With OOPS and TypeScript, the Angular codebase is modular and optimized.
2. It offers excellent features for developers like Angular CLI, Dart, the syntax for strict type-checking, iterations, Karma test runner, Lambda operators, and more.
3. Hierarchical dependency injection helps isolate application sections with their own dependencies.
4. It supports simple routing.

Disadvantages of Angular

1. It isn’t the best choice for creating simple applications.
2. Browser compatibility issues are a problem with this framework.
3. Steep learning curve.
4. Rising concerns with the current state of CLI documentation.

Use Cases of Angular

• Cloud-based applications
• Gaming applications
• Single page web applications
• Native mobile applications
• Progressive web applications
• Content-based websites
• User-generated content portals
• ⁠Real-time data application
• ⁠eCommerce applications
• ⁠Video streaming applications

Angular vs VueJS: A Full-Blown Comparison

Angular and Vue have many similarities yet come with specific differences as well. While they are among the top frontend web development frameworks, they stand out from each other in many aspects. The following points describe the key differences between these two frameworks, setting the ground for a comparison.

1. Popularity

As you can see in the StackOverflow developer survey 2024 above, VueJS stands at the eighth position and Angular stands at the sixth position among the most favored web frameworks by developers.

Furthermore, with 95.7k stars on Github, Angular is more popular than Vue, which has 46.7k stars on Github. Angular is popular for enterprise-scale applications and Vue is preferred for small-scale projects.

While Angular has a large and strong community base with plenty of resources to get hold of this framework, VueJS is still growing, and its community is rapidly expanding. Nevertheless, we can observe from the image below that 60.2% of developers admired Vue, and 53.4% of developers admired the Angular framework.

Also, 16.3% of developers desired to work on the former, while only 13.9% of developers desired to work on the latter. It indicates the rising popularity of Vue.

2. Performance

Considering the performance factor, VueJS outshines Angular when it comes to initial page load time. Its smaller bundle size and simple structure of applications help achieve impressive initial loading speed.

So, Vue offers enhanced user experience in terms of perceived performance, particularly on slower networks. In addition, its reactivity system makes DOM updates quite efficient because it updates only those components that are affected by a change in state (data, props, etc).

Thus, it further improves overall performance. VueJS’s rendering approach is based on Virtual DOM which is a copy of the actual DOM in memory. The result is smooth and responsive UI updates offering enhanced performance and UX.

However, as Vue applications grow heavier with the addition of new features and components, there is uncertainty about the application’s condition. It could affect application load time. Angular facilitates superior application performance with its Ivy rendering pipeline and various optimization techniques.

Its ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation reduces bundle size and pre-compile templates resulting in enhanced runtime performance and initial load time. While Angular previously relied on “Zones” for UI updates per state changes, the release of Angular v18 brought drastic changes to this approach that offer new performance improvements.

With the use of techniques like lazy loading and code splitting, the initial load time of Angular web applications can be improved significantly.

The following image shows the performance benchmarks of each of these frameworks based on different parameters.

3. Learning Curve

VueJS is easier to learn than Angular due to its neat, simple, and shorter syntax. In fact, it is considered the most developer-friendly framework from a learning perspective compared to all JS frameworks. It has an intuitive structure because Vue components are created with a combination of HTML and JavaScript.

Hence, a simple structure with Vue components helps in developing large-scale applications with reduced complexity. Its simplicity is one of the reasons why developers chose VueJS for developing applications.

Angular has a steeper learning curve for beginners as they must learn many concepts. While knowledge of JavaScript is sufficient to begin learning the VueJS framework, beginners need to learn TypeScript to get a grasp of the Angular framework.

Besides, you need to understand the concepts like directives, pipes, RxJs, standalone components, and more.

4. Code Maintainability

Another factor we are considering for Vue.js vs Angular comparison is code maintainability. Choosing a web framework that simplifies and minimizes hurdles in code maintenance is pivotal for cost-effective and quality web applications.

Consistency in coding is crucial for maintainability. Angular CLI and a documentation style guide can achieve consistency for Angular applications. It leverages the POJO (Plain Old JavaScript Object) model to manipulate objects with traditional JavaScript functionality. So, the code becomes more structured and independent.

Vue is a growing web framework, and there is still some unpredictability. Moreover, there is neat documentation of Vue and a style guide to streamline coding. Hence, choosing VueJS development helps you build maintainable applications.

5. Scalability

Vue is a lightweight framework and suitable for small-scale projects. However, it is less preferred for scalable applications. Though it offers flexible tooling to ensure scalability, it can be difficult to achieve it as the logic is tied to UI, and maintaining components becomes harder.

Nevertheless, you can use Mixin elements and web pack to achieve scalability with Vue. On the other hand, Angularjs is a powerful JS framework that can be used to build enterprise-level applications. It is flexible and scalable to meet the requirements of a growing business.

Angular offers a scalable project structure by combining modules and folders based on their logical units and features. Feature components can be expanded to make larger applications.

6. Architecture

VueJS follows the MVVM architectural pattern for web application development. It divides applications into three parts – Model, View, and ViewModel. The Model and the View parts are connected via two-data binding.

• View: It entails user interface functions like CSS styling, HTML templating, and user interactions. Vue uses a declarative syntax that helps define the layout and structure of the user interface.
• Model: It encapsulates the business logic and data of a web application. The data it represents can be obtained from user input, APIs, and other sources. The Model could be a plain JS object or an array.
• ViewModel: It plays an intermediary role between the View and the ViewModel. It is responsible for handling the logic and data needed to render application UI.

On the other hand, Angular follows an MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture focusing on the principle of separation of concerns. Just like MVVM, MVC also divides an application into Model, View, and Controller components.

In MVC, the Model represents the data and business logic, the View represents the presentation layers, and the Controller works as an intermediary between the Model and the View.

7. Testing and Debugging

Angular is an ideal option when it comes to testing. It comes with exceptional testing approaches and offers many tools, such as Karma and Jasmine, which help test the complete development code individually.

On the contrary, VueJS lacks adequate testing rules, which makes it challenging for developers to build a bug-free app. And when it comes to performance testing, you can use different types of performance testing tools for apps developed with Angular or Vue.

8. Support and Community

Unlike Angular, which Google supports, Vue is wholly driven by an open-source community. As an outcome, it is overshadowed by Angular and its alternatives in terms of collaborators. It commits regardless of having the most significant number of watchers, stars, and forks on GitHub.

Moreover, the VueJS migration aid tool is not helpful for large-scale apps as it lacks a plan that emphasizes continuously updating their plans. All of these pointers show that Angular outpaces Vue when talking about community support.

9. Security

Both Angular and Vue come with inbuilt defense features for preventing destructive attacks and specific vulnerabilities. These features consist of attribute bindings and HTML content filtering for Vue. Angular executes the same function as sanitization. It also hinders cross-site script inclusion (XSSI), cross-site scripting, and cross-site request forgery (XSRF).

However, it’s important to note that the programmer often manages the code security. The best approach to secure your product/service and its users is to adhere to best practices, such as using only trusted templates, plugins, and APIs, timely framework updates, and sanitizing.

Angular vs VueJS: A Brief Table

There are many factors that can be used to compare Vue and Angular frameworks. The following is a teeny-tiny comparison table of VueJS vs AngularJS, which showcases important differences:

VueJS vs AngularJS: Final ThoughtsIn a nutshell, both Angular and VueJS are power-packed frameworks with their own merits and demerits. Hence, the choice hinges upon the specific project needs. VueJS is well suited for smaller projects because of its lightweight structure and optimized rendering approach. Hence, you may consider hiring a VueJS developer to create lightweight and simple web applications.On the other hand, you can hire Angular developers as this framework has the best features and tools to develop advanced web applications with greater complexity and heavy lifting.Hence, you should make a choice depending on your specific needs. You can leverage our expertise in VueJS and Angular to develop top-notch web applications with engaging frontends. We specialize in these two web frameworks, which enables us to create best-in-class solutions for you.Get in touch for more details and a quick project discussion.