Svelte vs Vue- A Comparison Defining two Modern Frameworks

Svelte is a Javascript web framework that doesn’t  do virtual DOM diffing unlike other Javascript frameworks. Instead, it compiles and converts UI components into highly efficient imperative code that directly updates the DOM. This feature lets developers build intuitive user interfaces with excellent performance characteristics. 

Here are some market usage statistics for Svelte:

There are approximately 3151 live websites built with Svelte. Among which 14 websites are in the top 10k, 177 in the top 1 million, and 57 websites are among the top 100k websites on the internet, which is a good number even in its foundation phase; the framework has ranked among the best. 

• Single page applications 
• Interactive visualization i.e., apps that require data visualization through video 
• Web app for limited internet connection and low intensity devices 

Some example apps built with Svelte: https://madewithsvelte.com

• TeamSpeak– The all-new next-generation gaming platform providing voice interface worldwide with its extensive features, free tools use Svelte in its completely redesigned, re-engineered user interface. 
• Houses Of World is an unique project to explore houses across the world uses Svelte in its interactive user interface. 
• Doka by PQINA is a high-performing image editing software built for editing images, a client-side transformation of images, crop overlays, and more features. It’s a great user experience delivering software to convert images into the desired look that developers can easily integrate into their websites. 
• Tableplop is a browser-based online virtual tabletop to roleplay the games and interact with game players throughout different gaming activities like track initiative or rolling a dice. The application’s frontend is built with Svelte. 

Vue is a lightweight and flexible JavaScript-based framework that provides advanced web tools to develop modernistic SPAs and front-end web apps.

Vue is also considered a versatile and progressive JavaScript framework because it allows change creation in an application code without having influence any core feature built and this provides the opportunity to create progressive UI. With high decoupling, Vue also offers opportunities to extend the functionalities of the web application with customized modules and visual components. 

Here are some market usage statistics for Vue: 

• There are currently more than 1,523,449 successful websites that use Vue globally.  
• 93.9% of the websites that use Vue prefer Vue v2, and the market share held by the framework is not more than 0.5% overall. 
• The community of Vue is approximately 193k, with 31.5k forked projects. 

Pros of Svelte js 

• Automatic updates- It has a great technique to declare variables that update the user interface automatically with the change in data, eliminating the need to wait for the virtual structure to reflect and then process the changes in the UI.
• Less code– one of the main USPs of Svelte is its less code. The framework is more into writing real business logic without adding additional code complexities. 
• No Virtual structure/DOM- makes application even faster, resulting in faster user experience and increasing user engagement. 
• Brilliantly lightweight framework– it uses modern Javascript, making the framework seamlessly lightweight (4.1KB minified.) 
• Readable and straightforward- it generates high-quality, readable, and yet compact code. Easier development and maintenance whenever an application needs. Resources joining or leaving the team won’t make a hassle. Anyone can join the project and start working without giving much thought to understanding complexity. 

Cons of Svelte js

• Limited best practices– the framework is under development. The core team of Svelte is still working towards making it a better platform for developers to use. 
• Limited user base– the community is growing, and the development of the framework is underway. So, you could currently see a few projects running under the framework and not full-fledged popularity. 
• Lack of tools- The framework doesn’t possess mature tools for debugging and testing the application. The ecosystem of Svelte is still growing and may not fulfill the current requirements of projects.
• User experience- Svelte does not serve priority-based content in the user interface. It means serving the concurrent requests about displaying the content or loading sequences is not yet managed by Svelte. So it might struggle when users try to load multiple contents in the UI.

Pros of Vue 

• Progressive: Migration or integration of Vue can be easily managed by gradually introducing the framework into code while developing components is under process without having to waste any development time. 
• Conventional: Vue does not make writing boilerplate code harder by using in-built solutions to create state support for managing components and animations. The conventional approach makes the whole process of building applications with Vue faster. 
• Effective Size: With every new version of Vue that gets released, the framework gets even lighter and faster. The optimization ability if Vue allows developers to focus more on feature addition than debugging or code tweaking. 
• Functional Extension: Vue offers a set of additive API features that are function-based, which allow the composition of component logic in an application to be flexible and extensive. As a result, application components can become more readable and extended in functionality as per need.
• Future Ready: Vue is known for its strong production environment and thus there is not a need for updating or regularly checking the application for bug fixed or improvements. The framework makes the update process easier by default. 

Cons of Vue 

• Community: Vue has a community that lacks language understandability. With Vue being popular in regions around China, most of the discussion for Vue is in Chinese, making it difficult for learning, sharing resources for English-speaking developers. 
• Code Reactivity: The two-way binding nature of Vue comes in handy to create and sync components across an application. It also results in the rendering of data chunks or parts of features triggered by the DOM. 
• Support: Vue is still considered as a young framework, and since its community is relatively small when adopted for large scale projects, resolving less experienced developers cannot handle issues that arise for large scale projects. 
• Flexibility Risk: Having flexibility and options to customize is always reasonable, but Vue offers too much flexibility. It is often perceived as a framework where too many options over-complicate a project leading to errors and code irregularities. 
• Resource limitation: Though Vue’s ecosystem is wide, it still does not offer plugins and tools that are commonly compatible with most of the external tool sources and other frameworks. It also lacks support for most of the available resources. 

How does Svelte stand out in terms of performance?

Svelte is a well-optimized framework from the developer’s perspective. It offers awesome flexibility to produce high-quality code that just performs awesome. It optimizes user code at compile time. It means applications have minimum runtime overhead- taking the users to have the maximum benefit of super-fast loading and UI navigation. 

There’s a lot of opportunities where Svelte makes inexpensive efforts to bring app performance than other frontend frameworks. This compile-time framework focuses on reducing the overhead without dealing with the optimizations related to Virtual DOM. It means Svelte offers great performance without even falling into the complexity of Virtual DOM overhead and concurrent modes.

How does Vue stand out in terms of performance?

With each new feature added or extension of a component, the condition of The Vue application becomes uncertain making it harder for the app to load faster. But luckily, this framework has a virtual DOM, which serves as the default tool that helps in optimizing the performance of an application. Lazy loading is one of the prominent features of Vue.

It helps in improving the load time. Vue manages a third-party library in an asynchronous manner by automatically handling the critical dependencies by segregating the libraries into the ones that require to be added in the main application bundle and the ones that can be leftover in routes away from the core bundle. 

What kind of architecture does Svelte support?

At this point of time, there isn’t any useful information in the official docs regarding the architectural aspects of applications built with Svelte. Under the hood, Svelte is excellently designed to interpret quicker user interface inputs.   Since Svelte acts as a compiler to render the page using existing javascript,  it eliminates the middle steps of loading a virtual structure before reflecting the data into the real user interface.

Here’s why it’s faster than other frameworks when it comes to building user interfaces., Svelte makes the process a lot faster in terms of serving the content to the users pertaining to this feature. 

What kind of architecture does Vue support?

Vue focuses on following the ViewModel approach and undertakes the pattern on MVVM especially in the cases of developing a large-scale application. The View part and the Model part is connected in a two-way binding approach. Here’s what M, V, VM stands for in this framework:

Model: Functions similar to the Model object of JavaScript. Once the data object enters the Model part, the data instance is transformed into reactive elements for creating appropriate storage layers discretely. 

View: Actual management of the DOM instances takes place in the View part of Vue. It uses the DOM-based templating to successfully create root elements and correspond with the required DOM components. 

ViewModel: Handles the synching necessity between the Model and the View part of the code. This object is the primary part where developer interactions with the code take place. 

The architecture of Vue and its DOM structures are abstracted into two parts, namely the Filters and the Directives. Unlike most technologies, Vue is not a full-blown framework, hence considering that it follows a View layer pattern, the handling of application development is made flexible and simple.

How easier is it to test a Svelte js app?

If you are more inclined to the “lean web” idea, Svelte is more about your liking. It is safe to say that Svelte is more about contributing small size libraries and less complicated computations. Considering this pattern, you could write more testable code in Svelte than other front-end frameworks, since the frontend is more about how users feel and interact with your web application.  

Svelte is more business-friendly by generating testable code. It pushes the idea to write unit tests and offers a Svelte testing library, a very lightweight solution for testing Svelte components. 

How easy is it to test Vuejs apps? 

Vue is still a rising star, and its testing abilities are ordinary but straightforward yet efficient. It does not offer over the top luxurious tools as well as does not undermine the testing capacity of its code as well. Unit testing of Vue is significantly close to other frameworks and typically uses Jest, Mocha, or Chai. Some of the libraries officially recommended by Vue are Vue testing Library, Vue Test Utils.

They provide access to the application and user-specific APIs, making refactoring and code debugging a breeze. Faster feedback loops are possible to achieve as this framework allows CI/CD and provides hot reloading features.

Is Svelte js suitable for building complex apps?

Svelte is not yet at the stage of building complex web apps. It builds a cybernetically enhanced app; you will be fascinated to see how Svelte js process the components in user interfaces. Other frameworks might have a record dealing with input blocking events, while Svelte hasn’t proved proficient in a particular domain. 

Can you build complex apps with Vue?

When it comes to developing complicated applications, it might be harder, and here is where the coding part gets a little bit serious. Building complicated applications requires a code that can interlink different underlying components and Vue makes it harder to standardize the order of components.  But, with the help of Vuex, developing complex apps can be easily made possible without even having to write any spaghetti code. Vuex is a state management library of Vue which is specifically tuned for reducing complication by leveraging the reactivity power of Vue. 

Svelte’s ability to give the best user experience

Svelte is an aesthetically built smart UI framework. The aesthetics of its features, syntax, and framework architecture aids into the positive and powerful end-user experience. It is welcoming to solve problems of scaling web applications and accepting volunteering contributions worldwide. 

The additional improvement in technology is its speed and reliability of components pattern. It supports modern component-based user interfaces design with a reduced loading time (by eliminating the middle stage of loading the virtual structure/DOM.) Plus, the application weighs very low when compiled, it speeds up the loading speed, unlike other frameworks. 

The user experience is fast, smooth, and functional with the reduced speed and quick serving of displaying content. 

Vue’s way of delivering the best User-experience

For developing an interactive and eye-catchy web app UI, Vue might be an ideal choice considering the tech stack it offers. Virtual DOM ensures that changes made within the application do not directly reflect visually, which provides more scope and room for UI design experimentation.

The data binding nature of this framework allows developers to easily set HTML attributes and values that can be modified anytime without influencing the existing code using a binding feature called v-bind.  Templates, animations, and transitions can be customized as per the requirement with material components and UI tools like Cron generator, Chakra-ui-Vue, etc.

How Svelte contributes to rapid application development?

Here the elimination of extra compilation of code happens. Svelte removes the need to compile the code before the final user interface is seen to the users. Hence, the elimination of this extra task improves the user experience as well as developer experience. It reduces the loading time and increases the developers’ productivity and a by default, speedier user experience, and no extra chunks of code to load the framework at runtime. 

At what pace can Vue applications be built? 

Building creative applications are tremendous but building them more quickly is even better. Given the lightweight nature and rendering feature of Vue, developing apps at a fast pace is easily achievable. However, using some more add-on tools like Bit, StoryBook, Vue dev-tools, and web packs like Vue loader, Single-File Components (SFCs) can be easily created. This makes the workflow faster and proves to provide opportunities for rapid development. 

What’s the size of the application built in Flutter?

Svelte creates smaller sizes of applications. Svelte builds smaller bundle sizes of apps, and by that, it is recognized as the most accessible Javascript component library to run the development more productively. 

What is Vue’s application-size?

As already mentioned, Vue is a lightweight framework and that by itself indicates that the application size might not be as heavy compared to other frameworks. A fundamental simple Vue application has a size of between 50kB to 100kB, which is not a lot.

Vue CLI might make the application size appear large when it loads the code for the first time due, but upon implementing lazy loading components, codes can be broken up into smaller pieces and improve the load time. Tools like NuxtJS, Vuex, Bit, Vue-router avoids the need for writing code from scratch with effective state management that predicts unnecessary functions, codes, and eliminates them. 

How convenient is it to maintain code in Svelte apps?

Svelte adheres to modern application development. Every application built with Svelte is made up of components, and the app itself a unique component. Svelte manages the code by letting these components stay separate while still maintaining the decency to get displayed as one and work seamlessly.

You could see in apps built with Svelte having multiple components say button, text box, or form are all working consistently to give a consistent user experience. 

Developers reuse these components into one and another condition to speed up the process. It is relatively easy for developers to maintain the app structure. 

What is code maintainability for Vue?

Vue is still ever-growing and it is not easy to predict how good it is going to be in the future. Will they resolve their community language issues and support limitations? Probably but as of today, Vue is rising in pace against most frameworks that have existed for a long time.

This is a fact that might indicate that there is a good chance that maintaining Vue applications is not that hard. Since Vue lacks good support, creating conventional coding practices help to overcome limitations and obstacles. Some of the reports from Stackoverflow or Github may even indicate that Vue is future-proof considering its effortless integration abilities and code grafting continuity onto existing DOM and HTML mark-up with zero prerequisites. 

How good is the learning curve of Svelte for developers?

Svelte has an easy to go learning curve. No prior knowledge of Javascript code or additional typescript knowledge is required. JSX is no barrier. Developers slightly introduced with Javascript can also go along with the framework. Reusable components with individual HTML, CSS, and Javascript code are fundamental to building apps with Svelte. New developers are welcome to join the club!

How easy is it to learn Vue? 

Out of all the JavaScript frameworks, Vue is the easiest to learn and understand. It is said that it can be learned between a few hours and less than a week. Basic understanding of how ES6 functions and fundamental skills in JavaScript programming is all that is needed. Documentation of Vue is easily understandable as well though it might not be as rich as other frameworks.

The community language issue does not make it any easier for learning or sharing repositories with the community but the official documents are more than enough for a novice to get jump-started with learning Vue and developing web apps.

How convenient is it to hire Svelte developers?

Since the very essential knowledge required for building applications with Svelte is only HTML, CSS, and Javascript, hiring Svelte developers should not be a daunting task for your business. The average cost of hiring Svelte developers is between $20 to $40, while the average cost of frontend developers vary between $15 to $50.

How convenient is it to hire Vue developers?

Vue is easy to learn but when it comes to understanding the depth of Vue concepts, the availability of developers who are experienced with Vue might be relatively far less. This framework abstracts the inner code complexity with its simple architecture and flexibility in features.

Thus, a team of a minimum at least three or more would be required for a small project, and a group of five or more with at least one or two experienced developers is a must in the case of large scale application development. Companies that provide team extension  as opposed to hiring freelancers is a cost-effective way to hire Vue developers. 

How security is handled in Svelte js?

To this date, there are no listed prerequisites in the official Svelte document w.r.t security updates and guidelines. 

How security is handled in Vue? 

Creator of Vue, Evan himself once stated that “built-in sanitizer would add extra bundle weight for a rare use case,” hence automatic protection of Vue codes  against attacks like XSS or other vulnerability attacks is not possible. But with the help of external libraries or sanitizing the HTML codes before implementing the said code in the application database offers a fighting chance against security issues. However, Vue also can automatically inject necessary executable HTML, URL, JS codes to keep the application safe before and after rendering. 

Is Svelte js scalable?

With a compiler-based characteristic, it’s safe to say that Svelte is not the perfect solution to build scalable applications. But since it can be used in conjunction with other frameworks, there are speculations that it can contribute to building scalable and reusable components.  

Is Vue js scalable? 

Since Vue is a lightweight framework, it is often preferred for developing small-time applications and not scalable applications despite its ability to extend an application with its flexible tools. It might be hard to believe that Vue can offer scalability to some extent.

It can be made possible by forking a Vue application by breaking it down into multiple repositories to segregate the application for convenient scaling as per requirement. Since the architecture is a little dynamic, scalability is achieved using web packs and Mixin elements offered by Vue to override the code extending limitations.

Your key focus is to deliver projects on time of web and mobile apps. 

The Javascript-based frameworks – Svelte and Vue – reduce time-to-market and increase library support and code reusability. Their rich ecosystem of ready components makes them the perfect choice to build apps faster. What’s more, not only do Svelte and Vue offer rapid development they also reduce project costs.  

But, which solution is the best for your business?

Before you kickstart your project, it’s important that you study relevant use cases to understand the dynamics of your applications.

• Do your developers understand ES6 functions and JS fundamentals? If your answer is “ yes”, Vue is for you. It has sound documentation with instant search, offline support, keyboard shortcuts, mobile version, and more.  
• Are your developers proficient in Javascript? If yes, Vue and Svelte both make for a perfect framework for your project. 
• Do you want to build a progressive web app with a sleek user interface? Vue is the best bet. 
• Want to create an interactive visualization that gives an uninterrupted experience? Svelte is for you! 

Each application has its own merits. Discuss your project with experienced developers, prioritize the functionalities, and match your skillset to select the right framework.

Each of the frameworks has its own merits to make your application look smart. Share your views in the comment section or connect with me on Twitter.