We explore the most popular and most used JavaScript and TypeScript front-end frameworks of 2024. The frameworks listed here are selected by GitHub stars, npm downloads, and community activity. These metrics provide insight into their popularity and the level of support they receive from the developer community.
Graphs and visualizations available at pkgindex.com
| # | Repository | Package | Stars | Downloads | Created |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | facebook/react | react | 226,526 | 1,160,756,521 | 24 May 2013 |
| 2 | angular/angular | @angular/core | 95,547 | 168,080,619 | 18 Sep 2014 |
| 3 | sveltejs/svelte | svelte | 77,988 | 48,297,931 | 20 Nov 2016 |
| 4 | vuejs/core | vue | 46,290 | 231,409,789 | 12 Jun 2018 |
| 5 | bigskysoftware/htmx | htmx.org | 36,678 | 2,876,930 | 13 Apr 2020 |
| 6 | preactjs/preact | preact | 36,479 | 162,599,597 | 11 Sep 2015 |
| 7 | solidjs/solid | solid-js | 31,914 | 12,229,033 | 24 Apr 2018 |
Data available on GitHub
What is a JavaScript Front-End Framework?
A JavaScript front-end framework is a collection of pre-written code libraries that provide a template for developing interactive user interfaces in web applications. These frameworks support the development process by handling common tasks such as data binding, routing, and state management, allowing developers to focus on creating unique features. They enforce a structured approach to code organization, typically following specific design patterns, which improve code maintainability and project scalability.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Using JavaScript Front-End Frameworks
Using pre-built frameworks offers several advantages:
- Rapid Prototyping: Frameworks provide a structured environment that accelerates development, enabling quick prototyping and iteration.
- Enhanced Efficiency: By automating common tasks like routing and state management, frameworks reduce the amount of boilerplate code developers need to write.
- Community and Support: Popular frameworks come with extensive community support and comprehensive documentation, making troubleshooting and learning more accessible.
- Built-In Best Practices: These frameworks encourage coding practices that are optimized for performance and maintainability, incorporating the latest advancements in web technology.
However, there are also disadvantages:
- Steep Learning Curve: Many frameworks require learning specific syntaxes and concepts, which can be daunting for newcomers and time-consuming for all developers.
- Flexibility Constraints: While they provide robust solutions, frameworks can sometimes enforce certain design and architectural choices, limiting flexibility in how developers can structure their applications.
- Code Bloat: Some frameworks are quite large and can lead to increased load times, especially if many of their features are unused in the application.
- Over-Reliance: Relying heavily on a framework can make developers less inclined to understand underlying web technologies, which might hinder their ability to troubleshoot or optimize outside of the framework's context.
Top JavaScript Front-End Frameworks
1. React
The library for web and native user interfaces.
React is a declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It enables developers to create large web applications that can update data without reloading the page, using a component-based architecture to manage each piece of the UI as an independent, reusable entity. Developed and maintained by Facebook, React has garnered a massive following for its intuitive design and performance optimizations, making it a cornerstone technology in modern web development.
2. Angular
Deliver web apps with confidence 🚀
Angular is a platform and framework for building client-side applications using HTML and TypeScript. Developed by Google, it provides a robust framework that integrates a range of tooling and best practices designed to enable developers to build large, complex applications efficiently. Angular's architecture is built around components and services that promote modularity and reuse, and it includes features like two-way data binding, dependency injection, and a suite of powerful directives. This comprehensive approach helps ensure application consistency and performance, making Angular a popular choice for enterprise-level projects that demand scalability and maintainability.
3. Vue
🖖 Vue.js is a progressive, incrementally-adoptable JavaScript framework for building UI on the web.
Vue is a progressive JavaScript framework used to build web interfaces and one-page applications. It is designed from the ground up to be incrementally adoptable, meaning it can be easily integrated into projects where only parts of the application need to be dynamic. Vue is admired for its simplicity and flexibility, featuring a component-based architecture, detailed documentation, and an approachable core library that focuses on the view layer. Developers often praise Vue for its gentle learning curve and the convenience of its official supporting libraries for state management and routing.
4. Svelte
Cybernetically enhanced web apps
Svelte is an innovative component framework that shifts much of the work to compile time, converting your components into highly efficient imperative code that surgically updates the DOM. Unlike traditional frameworks that perform much of their work in the browser, Svelte writes code that updates the DOM when the state of the app changes, resulting in faster performance and less code. It’s gaining popularity for its radical approach to building user interfaces by eliminating the need for a virtual DOM, leading to faster execution and simpler code bases.
5. Preact
⚛️ Fast 3kB React alternative with the same modern API. Components & Virtual DOM.
Preact is a fast, 3kB alternative to larger JavaScript frameworks like React, providing the same modern API in a smaller package. It is particularly appealing for developing high-performance applications in constrained environments, offering a highly optimized subset of React's features with the same modern interface. Preact is favored for projects that require speed and efficiency without the overhead of additional features, making it ideal for embedded widgets and mobile web applications.
6. htmx
< / > htmx - high power tools for HTML
htmx is a unique frontend library that allows developers to access modern browser features directly with HTML attributes, promoting a simpler approach to adding interactivity to web pages. It extends HTML, allowing developers to define behavior directly in the markup, avoiding the complexity of JavaScript frameworks for many applications. htmx is particularly useful for developers looking for a low-barrier-to-entry tool for enhancing web pages without a complete JavaScript framework or extensive client-side logic.
7. Solid
A declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces.
Solid is a declarative JavaScript library for building user interfaces that focuses on fine-grained reactivity. Solid’s core principle is to compile its templates into highly optimized imperative code that efficiently manages updates. This results in exceptional performance and efficient memory use, making it a compelling choice for developers looking for a robust alternative to virtual DOM-based frameworks. Solid has been gaining traction for its simplicity and the way it combines the reactivity of fine-grained libraries with the familiarity of component-based APIs.
Explore Alternatives
Discover projects on your own:
- Explore smaller projects: Alpine.js vs qwik vs Lit vs Inferno vs Stencil
- Use "Front-End framework" on your PKG Index search
Source of the data: PKG Index
Explore and analyze trends across open source projects. PKG Index is a search engine focused on finding open source libraries, packages, and frameworks. Discover and compare tools from multiple languages based on their popularity and usage to find the right solutions and tools.
- Start your search: https://pkgindex.com
- Data snapshot available on GitHub: https://github.com/pkgidx/pkgindex?tab=readme-ov-file#data-snapshots
- PKG Index on GitHub: https://github.com/pkgidx/pkgindex
- About PKG Index: https://pkgindex.com/about
- PKG Index blog: https://pkgindex.com/blog
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