React, Angular or Vue: Which Should you Learn in 2021?

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Three frameworks dominate the JavaScript world right now: React, Angular and Vue.

Each of these see regular use in both the professional world and the personal. And whether you're a beginner to web development or a veteran wanting to try something new, it's important to understand what these frameworks offer. Are they worth learning? How much are they used? Will you be able to get a job?

In the following paragraphs, I'm going to answer those questions.

ReactJS

Created in May 2013, React is a “JavaScript library for building user interfaces”. The React team themselves came up with this incredibly creative tagline, presumably while they were in a hurry or something. Over the 7 and a bit years since its inception, React has exploded across the world. Today it is used in over 5.4 million projects, letting developers build large SPAs in a scalable and maintainable fashion. It uses component-based design, where individual ‘blocks’ of UI functionality (html, CSS and javascript) are composed into a single unit called a component. These are then combined to build a webpage.

React is the most popular web framework in use today, and it’s easy to see why. It has a relatively small learning curve, and due to its popularity, documentation is available all over the web. React projects are also performant, which is a result of the special way in which they update web pages. This is called virtual DOM diffing and is as boring as it sounds. Lucky for us, it just works. React also has a mobile counterpart, React Native, which is almost identical but produces code that can run as an app.

There are some situations where you may not want to use React. People tend to reach for web frameworks because it’s what they know, but if you’re building a single-page ‘about us’ site for your Dad’s 25 year old kazoo band, you probably don’t need one. In fact, you probably shouldn’t do that at all. Also, React is quite bare-bones. It provides all the tools you need to get stuff on the page, but web development is so much more than that, and often you need to consider other things like authentication, global state management, animation, etc. React doesn’t provide these things out-of-the-box and so you’ll have to pull in some third party libraries.

Good news though, React jobs are everywhere. If you choose to learn this framework, and learn it well, you’ll be almost as attractive as earplugs at a Nickelback concert. A simple LinkedIn search shows 9,307 results for React jobs in the UK alone.

AngularJS

Before React, Angular ruled the web. It was created in 2010, the same year ‘Baby’ by Justin Bieber was released. Take from that what you will. Like React, Angular uses component-based design.

There are a lot of things to like about Angular. It’s the oldest framework out of the bunch, with a long history of use in large-scale enterprise applications, and it has weathered many storms. It is also the only framework out of those mentioned here that offers a crateful of common web development tools out-of-the-box.

But Angular has seen a sharp decline in use over the past few years. This can probably be attributed to its complexity and size. Also, while offering many prebuilt tools is a good thing in principle, it can cause analysis paralysis, where there are too many options to choose from and you end up just as confused as my granny on Tik Tok.

The Angular team have attempted to fix some of these issues over the years and recently they released a version with a whole new engine that they claim creates smaller and more performant apps. Doesn’t seem like this has had much effect, but it shows there is still a dedicated community behind Angular that wants to see it rise again.

In terms of Angular jobs, there are still options. Many older applications will have been built in Angular and these need to be maintained and updated. There are also those who swear by it and will still create new projects in it. A LinkedIn search for Angular jobs in the UK today returns 3,716 results.

VueJS

Vue was created in 2014, so it’s not exactly new, but it’s still the baby of the bunch. Like the others, Vue uses component-based design.

Where Angular is complex, Vue is simple. Perhaps even simpler than React. It uses familiar syntax; plain old HTML, CSS and Javascript, colocated in a single document. This differs from Angular, where they are separated, and React, where HTML is replaced by JSX, and CSS is often not included in the same document. For these reasons, Vue is easy to learn, as it’s not really introducing anything new to someone who already knows how to work these three technologies. Plus, the collocation of each aspect removes the need to consider certain facets of project structure. Vue is very performant, and according to some sources it beats both React and Angular in this area. It’s also great for prototyping.

Because it’s newer than the other frameworks, and not as widely used as either, it can be harder to find Vue jobs. This also means it’s potentially more difficult to find answers to problems.

A simple LinkedIn search for UK Vue jobs today returns 1,950 results.

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So which framework should you learn?

Well, it depends on what you want. React is the clear winner, and if you are interested primarily in boosting your job prospects then that’s your best bet. However, monopolies are rarely a good thing, and in the tech world you never know when something else is going to come along and treat your favourite framework to a 1, 2, knockout. For this reason, diversification is best. Each of these frameworks has something different to teach a developer and investing time in all of them will give you the varied perspectives you need to take on what comes next. And I would be surprised if there were any businesses out there who think diversity in your tech pool is a bad thing.

To be clear, I know that people need to make money. So if that means you have to prioritise the hottest thing right now, then do that. But don’t simply wash your hands of it all afterwards. Learn what you gotta learn first then create a list and keep learning. The true question isn’t ‘which’ should you learn, it’s ‘in which order’. Businesses are drawn to a growth mindset. And remember, although React is king right now, and it doesn’t look like that’ll change anytime soon—there are still people who choose emacs over vim.

So stranger things have happened.