Most of us know Vue to be the progressive web framework that builds small to medium sized apps, but not many are aware of the leap it has taken towards the development of vast, enterprise-scale applications in the last few years. 

In this article, we will bring out the differences between two powerful Javascript frameworks, Angular and Vue, to determine the reasons that lead people to choose Angular or Vue.

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Vue And Angular: An Overview

Angular is a JavaScript framework based on TypeScript designed by Google and released in 2016. It is a completely rewritten version of AngularJs that was released in 2010.

Over the years, it has undergone several changes and upgrades to become one of the most reliable development frameworks alongside the likes of Facebook’s React. 

Vue is a progressive, front-end, Javascript framework developed in 2014 by Evan You (ex-Google employee) in 2014. Vue supports TypeScript as well.

Despite no backing from a tremendously huge organisation like Google, Vue has a massive following of developers and supporters who swear by the framework’s quality performance.

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As per recent reports, upto 30% and 15% developers are users of Angular and Vue respectively. Google and Wix are among the companies that use Angular.

Vue has prominent companies like Alibaba and GitLab using the framework. 

What is Angular?

Angular is a framework and architecture for building single-page apps that are built on HTML and TypeScript. Angular is created with TypeScript. It functions as a collection of TypeScript libraries that you load into your projects, offering both basic and advanced capabilities. It strikes an impressive mix between application performance and usefulness without sacrificing space. 

Pros

• Great Performance – Provides developers with great performance, which is guaranteed by hierarchical dependency injection, differential loading, and support for Angular Universal. 
• Binding Data– As Angular uses two-way data binding, it is simpler to maintain the data across several layers. A bidirectional data flow between the various components is beneficial.
• Scalable- As When working as a team on an Angular project, you don’t have to update the project’s whole structure for any little modifications made by any team member. 

Cons

• Framework with Heavyweight– Due to their need for abstractions, boilerplate code, and other packaged features, simple and modest programmes can get bloated.
• Complexity– Despite having a component-based design, the frontend framework is verbose for its development community due to component management and repetition. 

What is Vue? 

Single Page Applications have made Vue, an open-source progressive frontend framework, more popular. Vue is a progressive JavaScript framework that develops front-end and single-page web apps that are slick and dynamic. It produces cutting-edge online applications with dynamic and evolving user interfaces. One of its standout features is the great level of decoupling it has, which encourages modularity and extensibility.

Pros

• Project Length– The size of your Vue project has a number of benefits, including having a direct impact on the SEO of your website because Google search console opposes putting large, slow-loading websites up front.
• Compact and effective– Vue has a number of advantages, including its modest size and lack of many built-in functions. Instead, it uses third-party programmes to expand its capabilities.
• Optimal Size– The Vue framework grows lighter and quicker with each new version that is introduced. Developers may concentrate more on feature addition than issue fixing or code optimisation thanks to Vue’s optimisation capabilities. 

Cons

• Restricted Ecosystem– Applications’ ability to adapt to different operating systems and browsers depends heavily on the ecosystem. Due to its extremely constrained environment, Vue cannot be used with older operating systems and web browsers.  
• Risk Flexibility– It’s usually fair to have customization choices and flexibility, but Vue provides too much of both. It is frequently viewed as a framework where having too many options makes a project too complicated, which leads to mistakes and abnormalities in the code. 

Vue Vs Angular: Differences Between Vue And Angular

Let’s now discuss the differences between Vue and Angular.

Components

Both Vue and Angular regard components as an integral part of their frameworks. They reflect changes in behaviour as per changes in the input, which then manifests itself in the UI or a specific section of a page.

Components also make code reusability more viable.

In the case of Angular, directives are components. They represent DOM elements which are tracked by Angular to attach a specific behavior to.

In this manner, in Angular, JavaScript code is used to represent behaviors to attach to attributes of HTML tags separated from UI components. 

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In Vue, on the other hand, the UI and behavior are both component parts. This increases functionality and customizability. 

Community And Popularity

Evidently, Angular is a lot more popular than Vue, what with Google as its developer. But Vue also has a dedicated and loyal user-base even though it is comparatively smaller.

We will also take into account GitHub’s metric to determine popularity. 

As per GitHub stars (given to GitHub repositories), Vue popularity has seen a sudden rise in the last four years.

It stands alongside React as one of the most popular frameworks development frameworks. 

Both Vue and Angular have watchers, stars, and forks in huge numbers which is another indication of a significantly active development community.

Data Binding

Angular provides support for two-way data binding. It also offers compatibility with asynchronous services using which you can integrate Angular with third party elements..

Vue, one the other hand, supports one-way data binding. The data flow is seamless and which makes application development faster and easier.

When it comes to the code, data binding in Angular and Vue is similar. 

For example

The following code will declare a variable in the data() function:

data(){

return {

name:”Anita”,

a:10,

b:20,

emp:{name:’Meet’,age:23,gender:’Male’}

}

}

The only difference between Angular and Vue in variable declaration is that in case of Vue, the equal to sign (=) is used when assigning values as compared to colon (:) in Angular. 

Learning Curve

Angular requires knowledge of MVC and TypeScript. Vue is easier to learn and implement than Angular. Vue is majorly template-based and allows better customisation.

This makes it more simple than Angular.

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Architecture

Angular’s architecture is based on MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) and MVC (Model-View-Controller). Vue uses ViewModel which is relatively restrictive as compared to Angular. 

DOM Manipulation

Angular uses Shadow DOM whereas Vue uses Virtual DOM. 

Also, since Angular uses ahead-of-time compilation and can automatically detect changes, it allows a reduction in the frequency of DOM manipulations and HTML pre-compilations long before a browser can use the app components. This advanced preparedness is useful in case of a performance lag.

This could be attributed to be the reason behind Javascript framework’s high-performance tag.

Vue’s virtual DOM helps is designed to optimise performance by default.

This reduces the runtime as well as the initial load time, resulting in an increase in efficiency and performance.

Each time a change is detected in an application, the virtual DOM is rendered instead of the real DOM’s user interface which further increases the speed and performance of an app. 

Scalability

Angular’s modular development structure makes it more scalable than Vue.

Vue’s template-based syntax prevents reusing code, especially when large applications are concerned. 

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Loading Time

Since Angular applications are not exactly light-weight, loading time is greater. Vue has an edge over Angular in this regard because of its smaller application size.

However, practices are already in place to overcome this drawback in Angular with Ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation and tree shaking that can significantly reduce app size. 

Compatibility With Browsers

Both Angular and Vue offer compatibility with current and previous versions of browsers (excluding some versions of IE8) such as Internet Explorer 10+, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etc.

Syntax

As per the general consensus, Vue’s syntax is easier to read and understand than Angular. Angular runs on TypeScript and has a bit of a learning curve. Its injectors and decorators don’t make this any simpler.

Developers of Angular are also required to have a fundamental understanding of Object-oriented Programming concepts.

Integration

Angular supports integration with a number of JavaScript libraries and several third party elements. 

Vue is also similar in this regard. It supports integration with various front end libraries regardless of which stage the application development is in. 

Here are some differences between: react vs angular vs vue

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Complexity

Since Angular’s design and API are complex by nature, building large applications on the framework takes a lot more time. Angular doesn’t offer the best code documentation either which makes integration tougher than it has to be.

Someone new to the framework may get confused and end up spending a lot of time trying to figure out the core concepts to build an application. 

Vue’s design and API are a lot more manageable and easier to implement than Angular.

All you need is a day and some basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JS, to easily create single-page applications.

Flexibility

Angular wins the support of developers for it’s high flexibility when it comes to its architecture and support for other systems.

However, developers are required to stick to the project structure and several design principles.

Vue, on the other hand, is not as flexible as Angular.

Angular Vs Vue: Where Are They Used? 

Angular and Vue have some of the world’s most popular companies using them as their primary front-end framework. 

In the case of Angular, some of these are Mixer, Udacity and YouTube TV. 

YouTube TV has at least 30 billion monthly users, which is enough to acknowledge Angular as a highly reliable platform for live video streaming applications. Mixer also falls in the same category.

Udacity is an eLearning platform that witnesses continuous web traffic and interaction on its user interface. This marks Angular’s credibility in building educational platforms. 

Vue, on the other hand, has Chinese giants like Alibaba and Baidu, and Grammarly and GitLab, among other big names who fell for Vue’s relatively simple and flexible framework.

Alibaba is an ecommerce platform that is constantly under the likelihood to  crash due to the heavy traffic it witnesses. It would need a stable, flexible framework that doesn’t just improve interactions but also allows integration with tools and libraries to add to the user experience and support in increasing revenue. 

GitLab tracks repositories and contributes in the management and integration as well. Grammarly is an AI-powered English writing platform that checks grammar, suggests effective writing tactics and provides plagiarism reports. 

Based on this, we can conclude that Vue finds uses where lightweight, easily manageable solutions are required to handle massive traffic without resulting in failures.

These use cases are also a testament to the rich user interfaces that can be built using Vue.

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Vue js vs angular: Which is easy to learn?

Vue is simpler to understand in terms of learning because it doesn’t necessitate learning new ideas and languages. Vue just requires familiarity with Javascript, in contrast to Angular, whose description additionally calls for knowledge of Typescript. If you already know Javascript, you can start using Vue in a day thanks to its clear documentation.

Conclusion

Coming back to our first question, as you may have guessed, there is no winner in the Vue vs Angular debate.

Angular is the older, more mature framework and is perfectly suited for developers with experience in using TypeScript. Beginners, on the other hand, may get put off by its steep learning curve.

Vue, even though relatively new, has earned wide acceptance from the development community and has some giant companies using it as their primary framework.

Vue is better suited for those who are looking for flexibility and ease in their programming. 

As per their individual use cases, we also saw the extensive features and advantages each framework offers alongside their rich user interfaces.

Furthemore, the job market for both Angular and Vue is flourishing with ample job opportunities for skilled developers in both frameworks. 

In any case, this is not one of those “one shoe fits all” instances. You have to conduct your own research to find one that is more suited for you. So, yes, as to who wins, that is an answer you have to find out yourself.

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