With the rising popularity of Vue, the technology is on its way to surpassing React and Angular as a go-to frontend framework.
In the last edition of
- What has changed since 2021 and what’s the current position of Vue on the framework landscape?
- How fast is Vue growing?
We’ve reviewed multiple trusted sources and compared the results to previous years. We also checked how Vue compares with other popular JavaScript frameworks. Then we established an overview and drew conclusions.
Although the numbers are not consistent across sources because of different survey samples, we can say with certainty: Vue is steadily growing in popularity.
It does provide some unique (compared to React/Angular) possibilities like incremental implementation into an existing project, or ease of creating and maintaining small apps (not to mention beginner-friendliness). You can build long-lasting products with it, since it’s only increasing in popularity and use where in some cases the two main competitors have seen a slight downside curve. Vue manages to do all this without the corporate backing that Angular (Google) and React (Facebook) have. Some of the sources we used also don’t consider the use of Vue in China where it’s quite popular. Taking all this into consideration allows us to conclude that Vue is very much alive and kicking.
Let’s dive into the details.
GitHub Dependents
The number of apps that will not run without Vue continues to grow showing a 46,52% increase since 2020. What’s more interesting — Vue’s usage on GitHub has not slowed down, whereas Angular 2+ did and in the case of AngularJS the number is even lower than the year before.
With the latest data we still from 2020, it’s when HackerRank contacted 116,648 software engineers to ask about the same thing as Statista did. They also compared the results with previous years. Vue came in 8th but it showed a steady growth of interest among the HackerRank developers.
With the latest data we still from 2020, it’s when HackerRank contacted 116,648 software engineers to ask about the same thing as Statista did. They also compared the results with previous years. Vue came in 8th but it showed a steady growth of interest among the HackerRank developers.
BuiltWith
Looking at the current (May 2022) Internet landscape, we clearly see that Vue, although not being the most widespread, is steadily growing. Since January 2021, Vue. js has doubled the number of live and historical websites and more than doubled the number of live sites exceeding 2 million already.
When it comes to a share in top websites, Vue built far more of those in the top 1m than Angular. And while it built fewer big-hitters in the top 10k when compared to React, the share increased from 4,99% (in 2021) to 7,14% making it a pretty significant contribution.
NPMtrends
NPMtrends says that the use of Vue has been growing steadily in the past five years, maybe less so than React’s but it’s going hand in hand with Angular. Svelte is still crawling with total downloads of npm packages with little over 300k.
NPM-stat
NPM-stat shows the number of packages downloaded per year and the results confirm the growth trends from previous sources. However, take into consideration that the graph below concerns only the first four months of 2022 so we need to wait a little longer to get the full picture.
Statista
Statista interviewed 67,593 developers about their framework of choice In August 2021, and this is how they responded. Vue is up by two places since 2020 and now ranks 5th with 19% of respondents confirming that it's their framework of choice.
SimilarTech: market share & web usage statistics
A look at SimilarTech brings some interesting findings. The number of websites and unique domains built with Vue continues to grow from the very beginning. Angular faces slowdown or dips while the number of React-based domains has more than doubled. Historical context here clearly shows a growing trend both for Vue and React.
Stack Overflow Questions
The questions asked on Stack Overflow increase in numbers for Vue and React. More so for React, but this could be explained by the fact that Vue is more beginner-friendly and is lauded for its comprehensive documentation. Add increasing popularity (for both Vue and React, drawing in more beginners) to this rationale and we get a quite reasonable explanation. There have been noticeably fewer questions about Angular and AngularJS since around 2017 and a minimal share of questions asked about Svelte itself.
State of JS
As authors of State of JS 2021 examined, there’s a growing upward trend in usage of Vue.js by developers that reached 51%, the highest result since the beginning of tracking. Although Vue.js is easy to learn (more than half of the SoV 2021 respondents describe it this way), there are more React developers on the market who are already experienced in this framework and would use it again.
Google Trends
Google Trends gives us quite a broad spectrum of interests but for gauging popularity it’s one of the most trusted sources out there. There was a drop of interest in all frameworks around October 2020 but since then Vue has been trending again, slowly getting back on track.
Social Media
And one last place we can look at to see how Vue is doing is social media. Namely Reddit and Twitter — virtually two of the most authoritative social sources out there. Looking at the number of followers over the years it’s clear that Vue continues to get traction.
Over To You
As you can see, Vue has been steadily gaining traction since 2020, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. On the contrary, it seems to be more and more popular among software developers.
What - in your opinion - are the reasons behind the rising popularity of Vue? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.