Francesco Borzì

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JavaScript in Plain English

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4 min read

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Feb 2, 2024

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Yet another FE framework comparison?

Yes, I know. The web is already full of articles such as “React vs Angular vs Vue vs …” and that is already annoying.

What is also more annoying is that the majority of them just throw a bunch of shallow information and then try to conclude with the common politically correct finale that can be summarised with “all frameworks are good enough, the choice depends on your taste and your specific needs” — leaving the reader more confused than before.

But what annoys me the most is that many of these kinds of comparison articles seem to even copy from each other a bunch of overlooked commonplaces such as “Learning Angular is harder“ and “React is good for quick development”.

…If you ask me, I did not find it “hard” to Angular (especially since I come from an OOP background) and I think that all frameworks can be good for “quick development” when you know what you are doing. And if you don’t know what you are doing, you should definitely not do any “quick development” at all, but instead properly learn the technology you are going to use, whatever it is. But this is just my personal opinion here, and the first and last time I will express it in this article.

Let’s talk about data instead

What I want to show in this article is objective data: statistics about the development activity of each frontend framework. In this article I have grouped such information, that is already publicly available on GitHub. Another cool thing about those frameworks being open-source.

For this experiment, I selected React, Angular, Vue, and Svelte as they seem to be the most popular front-end frameworks in 2024. If you think I’m missing another important one, feel free to contact me.

I then went to their official GitHub repositories and compared the development activity of the first month of 2024.

Why is the development activity relevant?

When choosing a framework for your new application, it is important to check which options are the most actively developed. Of course, this is not the only factor one should care about, but it plays indeed an important role.

Choosing an actively developed framework is vital for security, frequent bug fixes, community support, compatibility, ongoing performance and feature improvements, long-term viability, and adaptability to industry changes.

Being the frameworks that I’m about to list the currently most popular ones, they are indeed all actively developed, but it is still interesting to compare the statistics about their development activity.

Front-End Framework Development Activity Statistics 2024

All statistics shown below are taken on the 1st of February 2024.

4. Vue

Source: https://github.com/vuejs/core/pulse/monthly

3. Svelte

Source: https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/pulse/monthly

2. React

Source: https://github.com/facebook/react/pulse/monthly

1. Angular

Source: https://github.com/angular/angular/pulse/monthly

FE Frameworks development activity comparison

I’ve created a table to compare the development activity statistics of the first month of each FE framework:

Angular is the winner here. The Google-backed framework stands out with a significantly larger number of unique contributors, approximately 6 times more than React, as well as exhibiting a substantially larger number of lines of code added and removed. It also addresses a considerable number of reported issues, with 180 closed issues in the first month of 2024. This high-resolution rate points to a proactive approach to bug fixing and continuous improvement.

React is in second place, although having a smaller contributor base with 14 unique authors, demonstrates an efficient review and integration process with 112 merged pull requests. Svelte ranked third and impresses with a substantial resolution of issues (145). Vue ranked fourth and its numbers are not very far from Svelte’s.

Here’s an image version of the above table in case you want to copy-paste it:

Conclusions

• Angular seems to be the most actively developed framework at the beginning of 2024, followed by React, Svelte and Vue;
• While these metrics provide an objective measure, it is important to recognize their limitations. Merely counting lines of code, issues, and pull requests does not fully reflect the effectiveness of code changes or the severity of fixed issues;
• Active development is a key consideration in choosing a framework, yet it is just one factor among several.