State of Vue.js in 2018

Vue.js, the so-called progressive framework took the JavaScript community by storm. Now, the state of Vue.js in 2018 puts it in a very strong position against the competition. Learn why in this blog post.

Popularity

Vue.js’ popularity is constantly growing and there are no signs of slowing down! Recently, in June of 2018, it has reached the highest NPM download since its very launch - around 1.6 million monthly downloads. It received the highest amount of stars on GitHub in 2017 out of all JavaScript projects, even more than React and Angular!

Check out this Star History graph. In 2018, the VueJS project has surpassed Facebook's React in terms of popularity on GitHub.

The interest in the progressive framework has also grown on other levels, especially the StackOverflow community - there are more people learning Vue than ever before! In other words - developers are thrilled to learn Vue.js!

While VueJS may be dominanting in tearms of how fast the project is growing, it's still far behind React when it comes to the NPM downloads. Although the monthly downloads have doubled compared to the beginning of 2018, Vue is not in a position to take React down anytime soon.

Why Vue.js got so popular?

Front-end developers find Vue.js easy to learn and then to later use it in their projects. It provides a set of tools that are really useful in front-end development, and on top of that Vue.js is really fast. To put it simply, it’s a very flexible yet slim solution. All of these pros significantly reduce the amount of code and the development time required to build an app.

The recent launch of Vue CLI 3 (you can learn more about it here Vue CLI 3: New Era in Frontend Development) has brought many long-awaited changes and improvements making Vue.js an extremely sophisticated stack option for many companies and development teams. It’s no surprise that Vue.js has been adopted to more and more projects.

Vue.js applications

One of these projects was a piece of our own product. We combined the power of Ruby on Rails with Vue.js to create this amazing looking real-time auction website for pieces of art. Our dev team really enjoyed using Vue.js and we’ve been using it more and more ever since in various projects (make sure to check our blog every now and then, more real-life use cases of Vue.js in production are coming soon!).

Let’s not forget about other applications. GitLab has leveraged Vue.js back in 2016. On their development blog, we can find some really promising opinions about the framework. GitLab developers reported that using Vue.js, as they describe, ‘the proper way’ results in improved performance, reduced page load time and overall performance increase.

9GAG, according to Alexa ranking, is one of the most visited websites on the Internet. It has, not so long ago (February of 2018), completely changed the JS framework along with the layout on the website. The engineering team opted for Vue.js to replace already implemented React framework.

Where to use Vue.js?

There is basically no limitations in terms of how Vue.js can be implemented on the front-end side of your project. We advise you to check out Made With Vue.js to see how many great apps you can build with Vue.js. As you will notice, it is perfect for SPAs. A vue.js application can be easily ‘converted’ into PWAs using plugins or cross-platform mobile applications using Weex or recently released Vue Native for native applications. These two improve the workflow of the developers because they can just reuse the already existing code and implement it on other platforms. It results in a much shorter time it takes to develop an application.

It’s also worth mentioning that Vue.js stands really strong in the Chinese market partially because the creator of Vue.js, Evan You, is from China and there is no ‘big multi-billion western company’ standing behind it. This is why Vue.js is often used by Chinese giants such as Alibaba (Aliexpress' parent company), Baidu, Tencent, even Xiaomi and DJI instead of React or Angular.

Here’s a brief comparison between Vue.js and React we did a while back. Check it out if you’re interested in both frameworks - React vs Vue - similarities and differences.