Best JavaScript frameworks for 2021

Tech trendsWeb development

With any JavaScript development, you always want to make the process as comfortable, fast, and simple as possible while also improving product quality. For this purpose, there are frameworks that greatly simplify the process and save a lot of time. 

However, when you just start working on a project, you will immediately run into the problem of choosing the framework. Which one is better? Which one suits my project the best? These are some tricky questions I will try to cover in this article. 

How to choose the right framework?

For a better understanding of the topic, let’s highlight that depending on the conditions and your demands, the choice will differ so there is no definite answer to what is better. If this is the first time you faced such a problem, you will most likely try to find the most trustworthy framework. So here are several factors you should rely on.

1. The reliability: can be assessed by the awareness and satisfaction of the community.
2. The fact of the ease of study and comprehensibility: an important point during the first use.
3. The framework’s benefits: you should pay attention to what this framework is “good at”. 
4. The well-documented guides: will help you to find solutions quickly.

Some statistics

Now when we know what to focus on let’s have a look at some other lists of top JavaScript frameworks. Based on Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2020, we can conclude that the most popular is jQuery, then React and Angular.

But they also mention that “… jQuery is still king but is slowly losing ground to React.js and Angular year over year. …” jQuery is so popular mainly since many old projects are written on it. Still, now more and more developers are switching to other options.

Accordingly, choosing the most famous framework does not guarantee its coolness.  

Judging by most dreaded and wanted frameworks, jQuery and Angular have slightly disappointed some users, and Vue.js became one of the most interesting frameworks along with React.

On theState of JavaScript,we can see the development over the years and clearly understand the community’s opinion about each of the frameworks. Altought, we come across several new names that have not been featured previously as Preact, Ember, and Svelte.

Now I suggest making a small overview of each of the above frameworks and learn a little more about their features.

jQuery is an open-source JavaScript library written by John Resig that simplifies HTML, CSS, and JavaScript interaction. It was released in 2006 and has attracted a lot of developers.

What has made jQuery so popular is its ease of use, big community, and ability to keep the code concise and pretty simple. jQuery is primarily designed to find and manipulate elements on a web page easily.

? This framework is used in developing small desktop-based JavaScript applications. But jQuery can’t compete with the modern frameworks with advanced facilitation of JavaScript, less coding, and reusability of components. It makes large applications heavy by putting a lot of code.

React is one of the most talked-about frameworks in the modern world. It was released in 2014 by Facebook and is very similar to Angular but managed to surpass the last one quickly. React is flexible, can be combined with other frameworks, and has a huge community. 

On the other hand, due to multiple updates in the framework, it is difficult to make the optimized documentation, which makes it harder to start with it. However, the large community makes it easy for new learners to get the concepts.

? React is the right solution for single-paged applications and creating reusable UI components. Also, it’s a good idea to use it in large web applications.

Angular was officially launched in 2016 by Google and offered all the necessary features. One of the things that distinguish Angular from React is its two-way data binding, which means the real-time synchronization between the model and the view. It usually does not require additional libraries and such functions as component-based routing, project generation, and so on can be implemented with the means of Angular package. Although it requires much effort to learn and documentation can be too complex or confusing to read. Fortunately, the big community will always be there for you to help.

? Angular is useful in developing web and mobile apps, enterprise-based and both single- and multiple-page applications.

Vue is a simple and straightforward framework that continues to conquer the development industry since it was released in 2014. In fact, it combines the best from leading frameworks and at the same time is much easier to learn. At the same time, the Chinese documentation and not a very big community can become a problem.

? Vue is recommended for flexible design structures and is commonly used in building UI, single-paged apps.

Ember is a fast and well-organized framework developed in 2011 with proper documentation but complex syntax and slow updates. Because of the conventional structure and small community, the learning curve of this framework is hard.

? Ember is great for large-scale projects, complex ecosystems, and client-side apps.

Preact was designed to make a JavaScript framework small in size, yet offering all the same features as React. It is quick, effective, small in size and you can understand after several hours of learning.

? If you want to create a small application that does one function well, then Preact may be exactly what you need.

Svelte is one of the most promising frameworks that was launched in 2018. It is not well-known but, regarding its unique approach, is becoming more and more popular. It is faster than any other framework, simple and easy to learn, and uses the existing javascript libraries. The only problem is a very small community so it’s hard to find solutions for your problems.

? Svelte is good to write framework-independent apps or any web app.

Final words

In conclusion, I want to remind you that you can not single out the best framework. You have to build your decision on the desired result. So before choosing a framework for your project, I advise you to first work out its concept well and highlight the main characteristics, which it  must satisfy. 

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