Are you wondering which JavaScript framework you or your team should learn? Or maybe you already use one and are wondering if it’s time to pick up another one? With several frameworks out there to choose from, the goal of this article is to show you why Vue.js is the best JavaScript framework to learn in 2020.
Why choose Vue? In a few words:
- Constant growth
- Friendly learning curve
- Ease of integration
- Outstanding resources
- Welcoming & helpful community
- Enjoyable developer experience
- Top companies are making the move—and for good reason.
- Vue 3 is on the horizon (stay tuned to the end)
Let’s explore these points in more detail.
Vue is constantly growing and fun to use
Among JavaScript developers, Vue is undoubtedly in a constant state of growth, and those who are using it are enjoying their experience with it. After 2018, Vue experienced exponentially higher NPM downloads, just under 3 million. So its exciting to see that was topped after 2019 with 5.4 million downloads. Evan You (creator of Vue) highlights in his State of the Vuenion talk, that according to recent surveys, Vue is among the most loved and used frameworks. The Monterail State of Vue.js 2019 report found that 92% of respondents who used Vue would use it again. This speaks to perhaps the most important reason why Vue is a great choice: it’s fun to use. We became developers because we enjoy developing, right? Vue tends to bring that pleasure back for people who may have lost it along the way.
More and more companies have adopted Vue into their tech stack as well (more on that later). In fact, in that same State of Vue.js report, 60% of respondents believe that Vue.js will become more popular within their organizations within 6 months while 73% of developers at enterprise companies are certain that Vue will be widely adopted in their organization.
A major reason companies are choosing Vue is the ease of onboarding employees into the technology, which brings me to the next point.
Friendly learning curve & ease of integration
When choosing a framework, you want one that is quick and streamlined for you or your team to learn. Getting started with Vue is surprisingly simple. You only need fundamental knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. That’s it. Often when people start using Vue, they comment on how satisfyingly intuitive it is and how it “just works” how they hoped it would.
Among the State of Vue.js respondents, 75% said that the biggest advantage of Vue was the ease of integration. With Vue, you can build a complete single page application from scratch, or you can add Vue into your existing app to develop features large and small. Because Vue is a “progressive” framework, its various supported libraries can be added incrementally, as needed.
Vue’s official libraries include:
- Vue Router (client-side routing)
- Vuex (state management)
- Vue Test Utils (unit testing)
- vue-devtools (debugging browser extension)
- Vue CLI (for rapid project scaffolding and plugin management)
Yuriy Nemtsov, Software Engineer & Manager at Behance, comments on the cohesive-while-progressive nature of the Vue ecosystem:
From the vue-loader, bundle renderer, full support in the vue-router and vuex, built-in component caching and even asset preload / preflight handling— the efficiencies we gain from a single integrated SSR-aware ecosystem are unparalleled. And this isn’t specific to SSR. Vue is built to be a progressive library where the independent components are designed to work together really well. They’re ergonomic, and we love that about Vue.
We wouldn’t be doing this topic justice if we didn’t mention Vue’s exceptionally well written documentation. 94% of State of Vue.js respondents said that they used the official documentation to learn about Vue.
Clement Ho from Gitlab emphasizes the helpfulness of both the community and the documentation:
“Vue’s fantastic documentation and guides also make it very easy for new team members to onboard quickly and start contributing code to our codebase.”
A vibrant community full of resources
When adopting a framework, you’re also joining a community, especially in the case of Vue. Unlike other major JavaScript frameworks, Vue is not backed by a major multinational company. While at first glance, this may seem like a disadvantage, I argue the complete opposite. Vue has complete freedom to be community-driven and its bottom line is the satisfaction of its end users. It doesn’t have to answer to the company-specific feature demands and corporate bureaucracy of a company like Facebook or Google. It is entirely self-governed and can focus on what it does best: providing the most enjoyable developer experience you can have while building robust web apps.
The community is very active, with passionate Vue developers sharing their knowledge in the form of blogs, conference talks, podcasts, and (our personal favorite) online courses. There are always new skills, knowledge, and tools to gain.
Top companies are using Vue
When choosing a JavaScript framework, whether you’re a developer seeking to be in-demand and hirable, or a business leader wanting to feel confident in the technology you’re investing your product in, it’s reassuring to know that top companies are choosing Vue.
So far, I’ve quoted team members of Behance (Adobe’s social media platform for creatives) and GitLab (the leading collaboration tool for DevOps). Here are some other notable companies that use Vue, with notes on what they’re using it for:
Nintendo
Nintendo is using Vue for a bunch of their online presence. A number of their regional websites in Europe are built with Vue.
Louis Vuitton
Louis Vuitton’s website is running on Vue & Nuxt.
BMW
BMW USA built a car configurator that allows you to build the luxury car of your dreams by customizing it in a variety of ways and browsing different feature packages that suit your needs.
Adobe
Adobe offers a product called Portfolio, a custom web-portfolio builder designed to help users showcase their creative work. They went with Vue because they wanted to maintain an exceptional user experience and performance. This is also a case where Vue proved that it’s easy to integrate into an existing codebase.
Grammarly
The frontend team of Grammarly used Vue to build their signature user interface, which blends simplicity with aesthetics.
Google’s Career Platform, including their job board on careers.google.com, is built with Vue.
Netflix
Netflix applied Vue.js in two of its smaller, internal apps.
Since Vue Mastery provides accounts for teams to learn Vue, we’ve also seen a lot of notable companies that decided Vue was the framework for them and chose to learn it with us. Some of these companies include:
- Apple
- IBM
- Urban Outfitters
- SAAB
- UBI Soft
- Cloudinary
- Vanderbilt, Indiana University, Princeton University, UCLA Library, NYC DEPT of Education
- REI
Vue 3 is almost here!
Vue is here to stay and it’s only getting better. Vue 3 is now in Beta and its official release is around the corner, bringing us boosted performance, a smaller bundle size, even better developer experience and so much more. While we are awaiting this release, you can still get ahead of the curve on learning with all of the wonderful resources on the web, such as our Vue 3 Essentials course, and Vue 3 Reactivity course. There are also many other Vue 3 courses on their way at Vue Mastery.
If you’re curious, Evan You talks about what all the Vue core team is working on in his State of the Vuenion talk. Here’s more of what we can expect from Vue 3:
- New compiler
- Advanced optimizations
- 3x better SSR performance
Conclusion
Picking a framework for yourself or your team is not a decision to make lightly. Knowing Vue is a framework that is constantly growing upwards, easy to learn and integrate with, has the most helpful community and resources, and has major companies using and loving it, we think it’s safe to say that Vue is your best option.
By the way, if you are part of a team that is interested in migrating over to Vue, we’re happy to offer you a 35% discount to learn with our courses. Just send us an email at team@vuemastery and let us know you heard about our discount.
