Skip to main content Accessibility Feedback

What framework should I use?

Yesterday, I wrote about how awful React is for web performance. One of my readers wrote to ask me…

You don’t recommend React as an front end framework? What do you recommend?

The answer is just a little nuanced (but not very), based on your goals and priorities.

I’m privileged enough to choose the stack I use. I’m an experienced developer with a social safety net. I fully recognize that not everyone has those same options.

If you’re top priority is paid employment, right now, React is a great choice for that. I really hope the industry starts moving in another direction, and I see early signs that it’s starting to. But there are so many jobs looking for React experience, it’s the obvious choice if you need to get hired, and quickly.

If your priority is long-term resilience and maintainability, vanilla JS (probably with a light build process on top of it) is the ideal choice.

It will never become obsolete, or suffer from a breaking version change. It’s fast and performant, results in less code sent over the wire, and generally has a smaller footprint of things to break.

It does sometimes require a bit more wiring of things together for the developer, but often it’s actually less work (and less work in the long term) than using a library.

If you need a client-side UI library, Preact is orders-of-magnitude faster than React with the same API, and an obvious choice. I think Vue has a nicer syntax, and while it’s a lot bigger, version 3 is much more performant than React.

If you want the benefits of a UI library with the performance of vanilla JS, a compiled framework like Hugo, 11ty, Svelte, or Astro give you a JS library authoring experience with the performance wins of mostly HTML and a little JS.