What are the best Angular.js alternatives?

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20

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Considered

372

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Recs.

Mar 4, 2023

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

20 Options Considered

Best Angular.js alternatives	Price	GZipped size	Repository
78 Vue.js	-	~30KB	https://github.com/vuejs/vue
68 Aurelia	Free	~67kB	https://github.com/aurelia/aurelia
59 React	-	45K	-
-- Mithril	-	8kb	-
-- Knockout	-	-	-

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score 79 · Answer 1

Vue.js

Top Pro

Much simpler, more flexible, less opinionated

Top Con

Poor typescript support

Very basic typescript support. See More

Maratik Asiatic :3's Experience

It has everything you need to the developer, and the rest of the features you download yourself. See More

Specs

GZipped size:~30KB

Repository:https://github.com/vuejs/vue

Top Pro

Single File Components

Components can contain a stylesheet, markup and script in one file. It can even use alternatives/compile-tos: instead of CSS: SASS/Less/Stylus/etc. instead of HTML: Jade/Handlebars/etc. instead of JS: Coffeescript/ES6/Typescript/etc. See More

Top Con

Is not as complete as Angular

In the context of the question, Vue.js is not as feature-rich as Angular or Aurelia. See More

MD M's Experience

Simple to learn and implement See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

55kb, less than half that of AngularJS. See More

Top Con

Not a complete solution

Does not do everything for the developer, it's merely a tool for building the UI of a web app. It does not have support for routing or models, at least not out of the box See More

Top Pro

Similar syntax

It uses a similar syntax: v-for as ng-for v-model as ng-model etc. <ul> <li class="user" v-for="user in users" transition> <span>{{user.name}} - {{user.email}}</span> <button v-on:click="removeUser(user)">X</button> </li> </ul> See More

Top Pro

Easy to read documentation

Quickly learn everything about Vue. See More

Top Pro

Reactive and thus very performant

Top Pro

Support for both templates and JSX

You can choose to use either a templating language, or if you feel it's necessary to drop on a lower virtual-dom level, you can use JSX. This is simply done by replacing the template option with a render function. Or alternatively, you can embed functions inside templates by using the <render> tag. See More

Top Pro

Can be used with any front-end stack

Vue can easily be integrated with other front-end libraries. This makes it an extremely versatile tool and it's easy to fix its shortcomings or missing features by just plugging in another library. See More

Top Pro

Fast

Faster than AngularJs in development, production and debug. See More

Top Pro

Supports inline templating

Although you can build components in JavaScript files, you can also use inline handlebars-like templating in your HTML views where simplicity is often a more sane choice. See More

Top Pro

Can be made even lighter

Since the template-to-virtual-DOM and compiler can be separated, you can compile the templates in your machine and then deploying only the interpreter which is 12KB minified and gzipped. See More

Top Pro

CLI and Webpack integration

Top Pro

VueRouter

Top Pro

Easy to use state management

Changing properties and reading properties is the same as in plain JavaScript and does not require complicated state management functions or demand immutability. See More

Top Pro

SEO friendly

Starting with Vue 2.0, Vue supports server-side rendering. This helps with SEO a lot, since the views are rendered directly on the server, which are indexed by search engines. See More

Top Pro

Single file component

Very useful. See More

Top Pro

Responsive server-side rendering

Since most of the mainstream server-side rendering implementations are synchronous, they can block the server's event loop when the application is complex. Vue implements streaming server-side rendering, which allows you to render your component, get a readable stream and directly pipe that to the HTTP response. This allows you to have a responsive server and decreases the time your users have to wait before they get your rendered content. See More

Top Pro

Reactivity system

Top Pro

Vuex store, events system

See All

score 83 · Answer 2

Aurelia

Top Pro

Few abstractions

Aurelia tries to abstract as few concepts as possible. For example: controllers are ES2015 classes, same thing with factories and providers. Since everything is already a standard JavaScript class, it's easier to understand how everything actually works. See More

Top Con

Small following

Aurelia is pretty new compared to some of the other options here and it hasn't had a fast adoption rate from developers. Which unfortunately translates in relatively fewer resources and guides from which to learn the framework. See More

InfluentialPeklenc's Experience

A very unobtrusive framework hence DDD can be used easily with this framework, See More

Specs

GZipped size:~67kB

Repository:https://github.com/aurelia/aurelia

Minified size:~237K

Top Pro

ES6 and HTML standards

No weird syntax code, just JavaScript. See More

Top Con

Needs more support from the community

It would be great to have a lot of plugins made by the community, or video tutorials from experiences when using it. Hopefully in the near term future. See More

DecentGrannus's Experience

Excellent framework complete although modular. Full standard compliance quite easy to learn See More

Top Pro

Simple and powerful

Any javascript developer can understand. See More

Top Con

No big success stories yet

There are no notable big web products build with aurelia yet See More

HonestDalia's Experience

Ease to code and understand, Aurelia have a complete ecosystem for build modern webapps. See More

Top Pro

Great use of conventions

Top Con

Self-paced training options are very limited right now

There's not as much training resources available for Aurelia as there are for other Javascript frameworks. This will be fixed in time as more and more developers use Aurelia, but for the time being it may be a bit harder for beginners to find entry-level guides and tutorials. See More

Top Pro

Fast

Fast rendering. See More

Top Pro

Does the right thing by default without boxing you in

Top Pro

Out of the box Typescript support

Full support for Typescript built in. See More

Top Pro

Works well with non ES6 libraries

Top Pro

Good binding system

Clear, intuitive and HTML/SVG compliant binding syntax. Examples: Default binding => value.bind One Way binding => value.one-way Two Way binding => value.two-way One Time binding => value.one-time See More

Top Pro

Conventions over configurations

Configured to give you the most common use cases by convention, which means you only need to change the default configuration for edge cases. This means that for normal cases far less boiler plate code has to be written. See More

Top Pro

Standards compliant

Aurelia developers always try to keep within existing and emerging Web Standards, making it easier for developers to follow best practices in web development. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use MVVM

Aurelia is a MVVM framework like angular. If you need a framework for a composite MVVM web SPA, Aurelia is your go to framework. It's much simpler and much less opinionated than Angular. See More

Top Pro

Tasteful, moderate use of decorators

Shows that decorators can be used cleanly and minimally. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Learning Aurelia basically means learning ECMAScript and HTML, since Aurelia is designed for standards compliance. Also, Aurelia embraces upcoming ES language features by convention, such as ES class decorators for dependency injection, encouraging clean architecture and future-proof code. See More

Top Pro

Agnostic code

Most of the code you write is Aurelia-agnostic. That way you can easily test it, switch to another implementation and make it look clean (business oriented). Even the HTML. See More

Top Pro

Powerful helper CLI available

https://github.com/aurelia/cli The CLI helps rapid creation of projects with generators, building, deploying and hot reloads. Webpack should be coming soon. See More

Top Pro

Loader agnostic

Works with systemjs, requirejs, and even dojo. This inherently implies a very thoughtful design. See More

Top Pro

Provides dependency injection

With dependency injection, you can load in extra javascript and new functionality just when you need it. This is particularly helpful with testing as you can swap out services for test services. It also means in single page apps you can load dependencies only as you need them instead of loading them up all up at the start. See More

Top Pro

Growing community

The Aurelia community is growing at a great pace. Still doesn’t rival the big players line Angular or React, but the answer to an Aurelia issue is a quick question away on their Discourse. See More

Top Pro

Plays well with other frameworks

Aurelia can be used alongside of React and Polymer, since it is designed for interoperability. In practice, this means Aurelia developers can use React components by including an Aurelia custom element. It also works well with Polymer, since they are both based on the WebComponents standards. See More

Top Pro

Can be customized to use different rendering engines

Like React for example. See More

Top Pro

Commercial support

Aurelia has commercial support and is an official product of Durandal Inc. Other frameworks like React and Angular are not official products of Facebook and Google. They're not even related to the core business of those companies (advertising). You can buy commercial support for Aurelia and not have to worry about being left without an upgrade path (NG1 to NG2). Or be told that software is at Release Candidate 4 state on one day and then be told the router is being rewritten the next followed by splitting the code-base into dart and typescript versions. (guess which version google uses... hint: not the typescript version). See More

Top Pro

Allows developers to build their application however they want

Aurelia is extremely unopinionated and was designed to be highly modular. This gives the developer the freedom to develop their application however they want, without forcing them in paradigms or rules predefined by the framework. Likewise, any of the individual components can be swapped out if so desired. See More

Top Pro

Out of the box ES6 support

Aurelia includes native support for ES6 and even comes with a Gulpfile which helps with transpiling ES6 code to ES5. See More

Top Pro

Data binding choices with sane defaults

Aurelia defaults to one-way data binding, alining with conventional wisdom. However, there are times when two-way data binding proves useful, such as binding an input widget with a view-model. Aurelia makes two-way data binding available to developers and uses it by convention when appropriate. See More

Top Pro

Structure

Aurelia.js consists of modules that can be used as a full framework or separately. See More

Top Pro

Pretty good documentation

Top Pro

Variable binding helps with self-documenting the code

The syntax used to bind variables within the application class is very similar to Javascript itself. You can specify the type of the binding you are using explicitly, which practically self-documents your code and makes it easy to understand whether a value is one-way or two-way binded. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

One of the most crucial pieces of any new technology or framework is the documentation. At present even though Aurelia is pre-beta, the documentation is pretty complete. There are code examples missing and whatnot, but for the most part it is concise and makes the main parts of the application easy to understand. See More

See All

score 44 · Answer 3

React

Top Pro

Easy to reuse components

Since every single UI component is created independently in JavaScript, it becomes very easy to reuse them throughout your app without having to re-write them. See More

Top Con

Not a complete solution

React does not do everything for the developer, it's merely a tool for building the UI of a web app. It does not have support for routing or models, at least not out of the box. While some missing features can be added through libraries, to start using React and use it in production, you still would need to have experience, or at least a good grasp on what the best libraries to use would be. See More

MD M's Experience

More complex of the 3 See More

Specs

GZipped size:45K

Top Pro

Virtual DOM support

Instead of relying on the DOM, React implements a virtual DOM from scratch, allowing it to calculate precisely what needs to be patched during the next screen refresh. This is orders of magnitude faster than fiddling with the DOM itself. See More

Top Con

You have to learn a new syntax

Requires to learn a custom syntax, JSX that has some gotchas and introduce complexity, a steeper learning curve, and incompatibility with other tools. Though you can opt out from JSX and use vanilla JS instead. But that is not recommended since it adds a lot of unneeded complexity which JSX tries to avoid. See More

ImmaculateChiyou's Experience

Been using it daily for about a year now, much more dev friendly than angular. See More

Top Pro

Good debugging tools

React has an official Chrome Extension which is used as a developing and debugging tool. It can be used to quickly and painlessly debug your application or view the whole application structure as it's rendered. See More

Top Con

Verbose

React gets a little verbose as applications get more complicated with more components. It's simply not as straightforward as simply writing HTML and JavaScript would be. See More

Top Pro

Can be used with different libraries

ReactJS can be used independently as the only library for building the front-end, or it can be used alongside JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, or even Angular. See More

Top Con

Slow

The Virtual DOM approach is extremely slow in comparison to the approaches taken by other frameworks. You can see examples here and here. See More

Top Pro

Small API

You only need to learn a few key concepts to be productive in React. See More

Top Con

No support for legacy browsers

React has recently dropped support for Internet Explorer 8. While the library may still work on IE8, issues that affect only IE8 will not be prioritized and/or solved. See More

Top Pro

Tested on Facebook itself

React is used on one of the most visited websites on the planet, Facebook. With stellar results and with million of people experiencing it every day. See More

Top Con

Large file size

React's react.min.js is 145.5KB in size. It's much larger than some other libraries that offer roughly the same features and it's almost the same size as some MV* frameworks such as Angular or Ember that offer more features out of the box. Although, it should be mentioned that sometimes having a smaller library may force developers to reinvent the wheel and write inefficient implementations on features that React already has. Ending up with a larger application that's harder to maintain and/or that has bad performance. See More

Top Pro

Easy to write tests

Since React's virtual DOM system is implemented completely in JavaScript, it's very easy to write UI test cases. Usually all you have to do is try different props and see if they have the right output. See More

Top Con

Anti-pattern. Mixes HTML into JS code

Top Pro

Unidirectional data flow

React's one-way data binding (or one-way data flow) means that it's easy to see where and how your UI is updated and where you need to make changes. It's also very easy to keep everything modular, fast and well-organized. See More

Top Con

Renders too frequently

Top Pro

Unopinionated

You're free to select the IDE, build tool, testing framework, and so on that you prefer. You can use Babel or TypeScript. React doesn't limit your options. See More

Top Con

Heavy on memory

React's virtual DOM is fast, but it requires storing elements in the virtual and real DOM increasing memory usage for the page. This can be a real problem for single-page webapps designed to be left running in the background. See More

Top Pro

Server side rendering

React can render it's components and data server side, then it sends those components as HTML to the browser. This ensures faster initial loading time and SEO friendliness out of the box, since it's indexed as any other static website by search engines. See More

Top Pro

Quick

React very quickly updates its components thanks to the virtual DOM. It only updates what needs to be updated. See More

Top Pro

Template engine independent

React provides a template engine (JSX) which is easy to use. But it's not mandatory. See More

Top Pro

Extremely lean syntax for declaring stateless functional components

Top Pro

Easy template mechanism

Top Pro

Extensive SVG support

Since React v0.15, SVG is fully supported. React supports all SVG attributes that are recognized by today's browsers. See More

Top Pro

Supported by Facebook and Instagram

React is built by Facebook engineers initially to be used only for their inner projects especially to solve the problem of building large complex applications with constantly changing data. See More

Top Pro

Keep control over your app's logic

React is just a view library, so you still have (almost) full control over how your app behaves. See More

Top Pro

Functional programming style leads to less buggy UIs

Top Pro

Synthetic Events

DOM differences and spec inconsistencies are abstracted away. Bubbling works correctly. onChange fires onChange since that's what you'd expect (vs reality where some browsers that don't fire the change handler onBlur for some inputs). You also get top level events for free. You can declare your intention and React will figure out the optimal way to attach event handlers. See More

Top Pro

One-way data flow

React's one-way data binding (or one-way data flow) means that it's easy to see where and how your UI is updated and where you need to make changes. It's also very easy to keep everything modular, fast and well-organized. See More

Top Pro

Flux architecture pattern

Flux is a platform agnostic pattern which can technically be used with any application or programming language. One of Flux' main features is that it enforces uni-directional data flow which means that views do not change the data directly. With React this is useful because this way it's easier to understand an application as it starts getting more complicated. By having two-way data binding, lead to unpredictable changes, where changing one model's data would end up updating another model. By using the Flux architecture, this can be avoided. See More

Top Pro

Pluggable

Can be easily utilized with other libraries and frameworks like Angular, Backbone, etc. See More

See All

score 23 · Answer 4

Mithril

Top Pro

Easy to learn

The small API, massive documentation and the fact that you really have to learn only one function, m.mount to get started makes Mithril very easy to learn and start with. See More

Top Con

Small API can make it unsuitable for larger more complex projects

Mithril's small API and small number of functions while helpful for small projects and applications where speed is needed, can add another layer of complexity in larger more complex applications where a more extensive API is needed out of the box. See More

Specs

GZipped size:8kb

Top Pro

Fast rendering

Mithril's loading times are very fast. This is because it's templates are compiled first and then served to the browser and because it uses a virtual DOM. The virtual DOM is a virtual tree containing all the nodes of the real DOM, every time anything changes in the virtual DOM, Mithril does not re-render the entire (real) DOM, instead it just searches and applies the differences. See More

Top Pro

Flexible

Mithril gives to the developer the flexibility to chose the best JavaScript library to use for a specific task. A huge framework like Angular instead forces you to use their API, which does not necessarily evolve as fast as the JavaScript ecosystem. Therefore you may end up in case when you are stuck using an API which is just not the best in terms of performance See More

Top Pro

Does not force you into a predefined struture

Mithril's API is pretty small compared to other frameworks. It forces developers to solve problems in JavaScript rather than in Mithril. Other frameworks with massive APIs force you to think in a way that suits the framework. Mithril doesn't do that. See More

Top Pro

Cruftless

Most other frameworks either offer a huge API to deal with model and view synchronization, or defer to other libraries & plugins to cater for relatively simple use cases. Mithril's API is tiny but complete. The natural reaction is to assume something is missing, but as you build you realise incredibly fast, powerful and rich applications can be built using nothing but Mithril. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

Mithril has a large and expansive documentation despite it's relatively small API. Mithril's GitHub repo has more documentation than actual source code. None of that documentation is auto-generated. See More

Top Pro

Views are written in JavaScript

Most MVC frameworks use HTML templates to render their views. They are good and useful because they are easy to read and understand. But they add more complication to an app because it's practically a new language and syntax that needs to be learned. Mithril argues that separating markup from logic is just a separation of technologies and not concerns, so you can write Mithril views in JavaScript. Writing them in JavaScript also makes it easier to debug them (HTML templates can't be debugged). See More

Top Pro

Small size

Weights just 8kb gzipped and has no dependencies. See More

Top Pro

Easy to debug

Since all the code is just JavaScript your known and loved debugging tools work perfectly well with mithril. Also since most of the data is pure JavaScript objects variables are very easy to inspect and mutate during debugging. See More

Top Pro

Friendly and helpful community

Top Pro

Gets close to real MVC

Doesn't lock you into any complicated conventions or structures, only one function is required to create either a Controller or a View. You're free to implement your architecture exactly as you want, so you can focus on the purpose of MVC, making connections between computer data and stuff in the end user's head. See More

See All

score 12 · Answer 5

Knockout

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Has a low entry barrier and an easy learning curve. It's especially easy to learn for beginners. See More

Top Con

Seems to be dead

KO has been stuck at version 3.4 for a long time, and there's not a lot of community activity. See More

Top Pro

Easy Data Binding

Knockout uses HTML5 data attributes to bind HTML elements to data objects in javascript. This allows more work to be done by the framework rather than requiring you to specify where data should be bound in the javascript. The data binding is very intuitive as the bindings are done within the HTML itself in the location it should be bound. See More

Top Con

Can become complex once the application grows large

Knockout leaves the application structure to the developer and it can become quite complex and unmanageable in the hands of a beginner once the application grows large and complex. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

The excellent tutorials with built-in exercises are a great learning experience, even for people without prior MVVM and data binding experience. See More

Top Pro

Dynamic Models

Models in Knockout can be watched to keep the page data up to date by using observable objects. The observables notify Knockout when data is changed and automatically updates the page when this happens. By having Knockout maintain this relation, it keeps the front end code cleaner and simpler, and by enforcing a consistent pattern with observables the methodology can be more robust. See More

Top Pro

Deep browser support

Supports a large number of browsers through different versions. It even supports IE6. See More

Top Pro

Built in Templating

Bindings in Knockout can also be used to control the generated structure of the HTML. There are bindings provided to allow for iteration and conditionals. The structure of the html reflects the structure of the data so iterative elements are bound to arrays in the data model. Having the HTML structure maintained by bindings keeps the templating simple, easy to read, and maintain. Knockout also allows for string based templating so you can use whatever templating library you prefer. See More

See All

score 16 · Answer 6

Riot

Top Pro

Easily pluggable with JS/HTML/CSS preprocessors

It is very easy to use your favorite preprocessors with the Riot compiler. Riot comes with CoffeeScript, ES6 (Babel), TypeScript, LiveScript and Jade support. You can also add your own parsers. See More

Specs

GZipped size:10.39KB

Platforms:Android, iOS, Web, Linux, macOS, Windows, Electron

License:free open-source software

Search:yes

See All Specs

Top Pro

Supports server side rendering

Riot has support for server side rendering. The views and data are rendered on the server, then those views are sent as HTML to the browser when a user requests them. This helps with initial loading time and is very useful for SEO purposes because the web app is indexed by search engines same as other static websites that have their HTML on the server. See More

Top Pro

Minimal DOM operations

Riot takes the expressions from a DOM tree and stores them in an array. Each of these expressions points to a DOM node. On each cycle these expressions are compared to the values in the DOM. So when a value has changed, Riot automatically updates the corresponding node. This way the operations are kept to a minimal amount and since the expressions can be cached, going through 1000 of them takes less than 1ms. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Two easy to read pages of documentation and you'll be ready to build your first application. Plus the syntax is very close the HTML and JavaScript, and to start making some complex functionality you only need to know around 10 API methods. See More

Top Pro

No dependencies

Riot doesn't have any dependencies, adding to the fact that it's a very lightweight library. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

Riot is made to be used with websites of any kind, so it's built to be easy and lightweight, but still maintaining all the needed features for a UI library. It's only 2.5 KB in size when minified. So it can also be used for mobile web apps without requiring much bandwidth to download. See More

Top Pro

Components use familiar HTML tags

Riot components use custom tags which are nothing more than familiar HTML tags coupled with JavaScript. This eliminates the need to learn another templating language or syntax. For example: <todo> <h3>TODO</h3> <ul> <li each={ item, i in items }>{ item }</li> </ul> <form onsubmit={ handleSubmit }> <input> <button>Add #{ items.length + 1 }</button> </form> this.items = [] handleSubmit(e) { var input = e.target[0] this.items.push(input.value) input.value = '' } </todo> Riot tries to separate HTML and JavaScript, while still keeping them inside the component. This way, the HTML can also be neatly mixed with JavaScript expressions. See More

Top Pro

Very simple

It makes React look confusing as hell. Nothing against React - It's just that easy to implement! See More

Top Pro

Lives well with any other library, framework and usage pattern

Since it's not opinionated, even the scripting can be in anything that can be transpired to JavaScript. See More

Top Pro

Focused

It does no more and no less than what you'd want web-component to do and does it right. Any other concerns, such as routing, pubsub, model - is out of its scope, as it should be. See More

Top Pro

Fast

It is one of the fastest ones around. See More

Top Pro

Separation of concerns with RiotControl

RiotControl is inspired by Facebook's Flux Architecture Pattern and it's a simple Central Event Controller/Dispatcher for Riot. It's extremely lightweight (like Riot itself) but unfortunately passes up on some features in favor of performance and simplicity. RiotControl helps with storing the stater of the application, by passing events from views to stores and vice-versa. Stores can communicate with many views and views can do the same with many stores, this enables to clearly separate concerns and inter-component communication. See More

Top Pro

Scoped CSS available in components

Riot supports scoped CSS inside components for every browser by rewriting stylesheet rules. See More

See All

score 9 · Answer 7

Backbone

Top Pro

Tightly integrated with underscore.js

Backbone collections and models are extended by underscore.js method allowing you to call underscore methods directly on the Backbone objects. See More

Top Con

Requires more coding compared to other frameworks

Because many features are not provided out of the box, you either have to write more base class code to get those features, or find a plugin that provides them in a way you like. It does not provide much structure either, things like memory management must be kept in mind by the developer, also the lack of view lifecycle management makes state changes prone to memory leaks. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight unopinionated views

A lightweight view class is provided but there is no default templating method implemented. Because views are minimal it allows for much more freedom to implement views however you would like, and because of this freedom it's possible to write views to more uniquely adapt to a problem. User interactions are done within an events object that allows these interactions to be segregated from the rest of the view code which makes the behavioral aspect of the view easier to read and manage. See More

Top Con

No data binding

Backbone does not have data binding support. However, there are some libraries that can be implemented in order to have data binding in Backbone. Such as Epoxy See More

Top Pro

Large community

Backbone has existed longer than most frameworks, and has a large following of users and projects using it as a framework. See More

Top Pro

Event based objects

All Backbone classes extend an events class that allows for listening and triggering functionality. Because all classes implement events by default it is easier to provide asynchronous communication between objects, and it allows better abstraction of interaction so the event emitting object does not need to know the structure or existence of the receiving object. See More

Top Pro

Ultimate flexibility

Backbone can be combined with any library of your choosing, giving you the ultimate flexibility in creating customized solutions for unique projects. Even the only two backbone requirements, jQuery and underscore can be replaced with equivalent libraries like zepto or lo-dash. See More

Top Pro

Backbone doesn’t force you into a particular coding style or paradigm

There is no “magic” happening below the surface: the source code is clear, readable and well commented. Backbone is also “lightweight” in the sense that it doesn’t require a ton of buy-in to use. It can be easily integrated into an existing page, and you can choose to only use certain components of the library (Views without Models or Collections, for example). While there are many frameworks that seem to be faster to get started with, Backbone’s lack of surprises, clear documentation, speed & flexibility make it a good fit for all types of apps. See More

Top Pro

Model binding extensions

Backbone doesn't have model binding, like many of the other javascript frameworks. There are a few projects that add model binding to backbone, however. Rivets.js and Backbone.ModelBinding are two well-developed ones. See More

Top Pro

Extendable with plugins

Because Backbone is so simple, and the different components are very well isolated, it is very easy to extend the functionality of Backbone. If you're writing your own extended code it's easy to keep it separated out, and share with the community. The community also has many plugins already available, which you can pick and choose to use to fit your programming style. See More

Top Pro

Data mirrors server

Backbone provides Model and Collection classes that provide strong analogs to restful resources. These strong analogs allow you to interface more naturally with the API, and makes it easier to write custom behaviors for more complicated API interactions. Collections provide a variety of powerful manipulation methods that are integrated from the underscore library, that allow you to manipulate, sort, and filter collection data easily. See More

Top Pro

Use with Marionette to have even more power

Top Pro

Backbone with Knockout features

Knockback.js easily adds Knockout features to Backbone See More

Top Pro

Easy to implement complex user interaction

Because all the state is managed by Models and Controllers, and they are extendable objects, you can isolate all the state logic onto those objects allowing the rest of the application to not worry about it. The app is simplified to just taking in input to modify the Models and Controllers, and updating the views to reflect them, but none of the state needs to be a concern outside of the Model and Controller classes. See More

See All

score 9 · Answer 8

Angular

Top Pro

Great tooling and language support

Very good CLI and webpack, bundling, testing, deployment support. Deep TypeScript integration and support. See More

Top Con

Native i18n support over-engineered

Not developer-friendly. Switching languages need reloading the whole page. There are third party solutions that work better. See More

Top Con

Slightly over-engineered

Very enterprisey - made for huge architectures and with tons of declarative, non-intuitive annotations it makes it overkill for very small projects. See More

See All

score 14 · Answer 9

Ember

Top Pro

Opinionated in terms of application structure

Ember already defines the general application structure and organization for you. This was done to prevent developers from making mistakes which would needlessly over-complicate their application. While it's still possible to go out of these practices forced to developers by the Ember authors, you still have to go out of your way to force them. See More

Top Con

Large library size

At 69Kb gzipped, it is one of the largest JavaScript frameworks. This means Ember might be an overkill to use on simpler projects. See More

Top Pro

Ember-CLI

Ember-CLI is a very useful tool. With just a couple of commands it scaffolds the code, installs dependencies and finally compiles everything itself. It's very useful to quickstart an Ember project. See More

Top Con

Very opinionated

Ember (and many extensions, like Ember Data) force the implementation down specific architectural paths. These paths are what Ember believes is best practice and typically are fine, but not in all cases. This can occasionally lead to fighting with your framework which is never productive. See More

Top Pro

Uses Handlebars

Ember's preferred templating language is Handlebars. This is mainly because Handlebars is a logic-less templating language and Ember tries to keep it's logic outside the view. Another reason why Ember benefits from Handlebars is mostly aesthetic as Handlebar's clean syntax makes for easier to read and understand templates. Finally, Handlebars templates are compiled instead of interpreted, which means that they are much faster to load. See More

Top Con

Partly unfriendly community

Top Pro

Convention over configuration

Ember follows the philosophy of "convention over configuration" meaning that it already has almost everything configured for you, so you just have to start coding and developing your project right away. See More

Top Pro

Complete front-end stack

Ember is practically a complete full-stack front-end framework. It comes with it's own asset pipeline, router, services etc... See More

Top Pro

Completely community based

Top Pro

One of the fastest template rendering engines (new glimmer)

Top Pro

Easy to understand documentation

The Ember Guides are well structured and very well written. The API documentation is also fantastic. See More

Top Pro

Ember's Object model makes the framework extremely consistent

Most of Ember's components come from the Ember Object Model. It's the basis for views, controllers, models and even the framework itself. This means that the framework is extremely consistent since almost every component shares the same core functionalities and properties since they are all derived from the same object. See More

Top Pro

Excellent routing

Route handlers for the URLs can see a wide range of possible application states, asynchronous logic in the router makes sure of Promises. And implementing makes sense. See More

Top Pro

The run loop

It batches bindings and DOM updates to increase performance; if similar tasks are added to a batch, the browser would only need to process them in one single go, as compared to re-computing for each task one at a time. See More

Top Pro

Excellent API

Ember's API are really easy to understand and work with. It has methods which allow you to harness complicated functionalities in an easy to understand way. See More

Top Pro

New router has less boilerplate code

Ember's new router need much less boilerplate code that it previously did. See More

Top Pro

Debugging tool for almost every web browser

Ember also has a debugging tool called Ember Inspector which is used for debugging the client side of your app. See More

Top Pro

Works great with jQuery

You can use any of jQuery’s features. See More

Top Pro

Useful bindings

EmberJS provides with an extremely handy feature of advanced bindings. With this you can not only set the path to the binding value in your app but also set in which direction you want the changes to propagate to (oneway, single, multiple etc). See More

Top Pro

Promises everywhere

Promises represent an eventual state in asynchronous logic. Having promises everywhere (almost) means you could write simple and modular code, using almost any API that Ember provides. See More

Top Pro

Computed properties

Having custom properties in your templates is itself a huge plus but having custom computed properties is an even greater benefit, since now you can code your custom function as a property and call it from your template. Hence rendering your page exactly according to your needs. See More

Top Pro

Built-in router

Ember comes with built-in routing capabilities. There's no need to install third-party plugins to be able to use routes. See More

Top Pro

Auto-updating templates

If you've used handlebars (Ember.js's templating is powered by HandleBars) helper tags in your code (like {{#each}}) you won't have to worry about updating your template each time you add/remove data from your page, Handlebars will auto update your template for you. See More

See All

score 3 · Answer 10

Ember.js

Top Pro

Complete front-end stack

Ember is practically a complete full-stack front-end framework. It comes with its own asset pipeline, router, services etc. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

Ember.js has a rather steep learning curve for beginners. See More

Specs

Price:Free

Top Pro

Stunning developer experience

You build products instead of constantly configuring the stuff. See More

Top Pro

Uses Glimmer 2, a very fast template rendering engine

Glimmer 2, a new and very fast template rendering engine written in TypeScript, is fast due to smaller precompiled template sizes, faster parsing and initial render, and compiles at runtime to extremely efficient assembly-like append opcodes. See More

Top Pro

Continually evolving

Ember has a great core team and community of developers who are continually improving, updating and evolving the framework. The Ember team is always planning ahead and implementing the best of the latest technologies and practices, while ensuring backwards compatability. See More

Top Pro

Out-of-the-box CLI tool which scaffolds a new project

Ember-CLI is a very useful tool. With just a couple of commands it scaffolds the code, installs dependencies and finally compiles everything itself. It's very useful to quickstart an Ember project. See More

Top Pro

Helps developers with keeping the structure of the application clean and simple

Ember already defines the general application structure and organization for you. This was done to prevent developers from making mistakes which would needlessly over-complicate their application. While it's still possible to go out of these practices forced to developers by the Ember authors, you still have to go out of your way to force them. See More

Top Pro

Built-in router

Ember comes with built-in routing capabilities. There's no need to install third-party plugins to be able to use routes. See More

Top Pro

Excellent data layer

Ember provides a built-in data layer, which makes it super simple to keep the UI in sync with the back end. See More

Top Pro

Debugging tool for almost every web browser

Ember also has a debugging tool called Ember Inspector which is used for debugging the client side of your app. See More

Top Pro

Auto-updating templates

If you've used handlebars (Ember.js's templating is powered by HandleBars) helper tags in your code (like {{#each}}) you won't have to worry about updating your template each time you add/remove data from your page, Handlebars will auto update your template for you. See More

Top Pro

Useful bindings

EmberJS provides with an extremely handy feature of advanced bindings. With this you can not only set the path to the binding value in your app but also set in which direction you want the changes to propagate to (oneway, single, multiple etc). See More

Top Pro

Uses a relatively clean and easy to understand templating engine

Ember's preferred templating language is Handlebars. This is mainly because Handlebars is a logic-less templating language and Ember tries to keep it's logic outside the view. Another reason why Ember benefits from Handlebars is mostly aesthetic as Handlebar's clean syntax makes for easier to read and understand templates. Finally, Handlebars templates are compiled instead of interpreted, which means that they are much faster to load. See More

Top Pro

Minimal need for configuration

Ember follows the philosophy of "convention over configuration" meaning that it already has almost everything configured for you, so you just have to start coding and developing your project right away. See More

Top Pro

Increased performance because similar tasks are processed in one go

It batches bindings and DOM updates to increase performance; if similar tasks are added to a batch, the browser would only need to process them in one single go, as compared to re-computing for each task one at a time. See More

Top Pro

Excellent routing

Route handlers for the URLs can see a wide range of possible application states, asynchronous logic in the router makes sure of Promises. And implementing makes sense. See More

Top Pro

Clear and organized documentation

With so many amazing tools out there, a framework with a good documentation has become a distinguishing feature in choosing it for your next project. Forunately Ember.js does provide you with a very readable, extensive and easy-to-understand documentation. See More

Top Pro

Easy to understand documentation

The Ember Guides are well structured and very well written. The API documentation is also fantastic. See More

See All

score 5 · Answer 11

Polymer

Top Pro

Promising futuristic framework with great ecosystem

Polymer in 2016 has come a long way and seems to have good long term promise in this fast evolving space. Polymer 2.0 is just around the corner with lot more improvements. Great out of box polymer paper components and with polymer CLI, the ecosystem does seem easily approachable unlike react/redux world where it takes a long time to get up to speed and become an expert. See More

Top Con

Slow performance in mobile

Since most mobile web browsers don't have a very powerful JS engine, Polymer can be a little slow for mobile devices. See More

Specs

v2.0 GZipped size (Safari):13K

v1.0 GZipped size:53K

v2.0 GZipped size (Chrome):10K

v2.0 GZipped size (Edge):36K

See All Specs

Top Pro

Based on web components

Web Components are a collection of specifications released by W3C as a way to reduce the complexity of web apps by creating reusable components. Browser support is currently poor for web components, however Polymer is developed to make web components compatible with modern browsers. See More

Top Con

Lack of browser support

Due to web components being so new, there is still a lot of issues with browser compatibility. Though Polymer has solved some of these compatibility issues with polyfills, there is still a lot of bugs and unpredictability. See More

Top Pro

Flex layout components

It provides Flex layout components. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 12

Metayota HTML Engine

Top Pro

Fast and leightweight

The framework is only approx. 10 kilobytes in size and 2k lines of code. The custom tags can be lazy-loaded or preloaded. The rendering process is fast and selective, so only updated elements are rendered. See More

infinity144's Experience

Just awesome! A super easy JS framework! See More

Specs

Top Pro

IDE for progamming

Metayota offers an IDE for programming or designing tags for this framework. There is no programming knowledge needed and all tags can be tested instantly. See More

Top Pro

Clean Code / Clean HTML

Readable, easy to maintain and clean code. The Metayota HTML Engine does not add any non-standard HTML elements to your code or any unintended tags or attributes. The HTML can be written, like it was intended by the designer. Only elements which are finished with rendering are added to the DOM (no flickering). See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 13

Monkberry

Top Pro

Lightweight

Only 1kb. See More

Top Pro

Performant

score 1 · Answer 14

Sencha Ext JS

Top Con

Sencha CMD (their CLI) is under documented, and out of date

Their latest release of CMD changed some configuration locations, but the documentation was not updated to reflect this. There is no reference guide on the json configuration files, other than the (unfortunate use of) comments in the generated json files. See More

Top Pro

Integrates with 3rd party easily with simple CSS config

Since version 5.x ExtJS added the ability to 'sandbox' a section of your layout to use a separate CSS or layout to ExtJS styles allowing for use of 3rd party (even Bootstrap) components to be embeded. See More

Top Con

Sencha CMD is bloated and frustrating to work with

To do any meaningful development, you are stuck with CMD. There is a gulp task that will handle the JS concatenation, but there is nothing outside of CMD that can handle theming in their ecosystem. In addition, CMD is based on Java, and is very heavy to run (600MB+ on Windows 10 to watch for changes in the application and recompile). See More

Top Pro

Sencha CMD (as of 2018) is now node-based and 3rd party tool friendly

Sencha CMD has been rewritten from the ground up and now works with common professional development and CI toolkits. See More

Top Con

Independent Developer Licenses are around USD $1k

Single licenses came back in Dec 2017, but still around $1k which can be a big bite for small devs, but still good news that 5 dev minimum was removed. See More

Top Con

Independent Developer Licences are around USD$1k

Single licences came back in Dec 2017, but still around $1k which can be a big bite for small devs, but still good news that 5 dev minimum was removed. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 15

Ractive.js

score 2 · Answer 16

slim.js

Top Pro

Similar syntax, lightweight and uses native web components

EmpatheticSarpanit's Experience

fast, easy to use, based on native browser api See More

Specs

score 1 · Answer 17

CanJS

Add Video or Image

score 3 · Answer 18

Glimmer.js

Top Pro

Typescript by default

Top Con

Not suited for big applications as Glimmer.js is pure and only component focused

PowerfulTjilbruke's Experience

Sample glimmer.js application by simplabs - https://breethe.app/ Code: https://github.com/simplabs/breethe-client See More

Top Pro

Super fast

Uses the new glimmer rendering engine. See More

fpx's Experience

Glimmer.js is a component toolkit based on the glimmer rendering engine that is used by Ember.js. See More

Top Pro

Great developer experience due to Ember-CLI

Top Pro

Tiny builds

Top Pro

Handlebars templates by default

See All

score 1 · Answer 19

cappuccino

score 1 · Answer 20

Angular Light

Top Pro

Compact

~15kb minified and gzipped, no dependency. See More

Top Con

Doesn't have many things that Angular has

Angular light doesn't have things like directives, services, factories, router etc... built in. See More

Top Pro

Powerful

Two Way Data-Binding, Templates, Directives, Text directives, Static bindings, Invisible mode and more. See More

See All

20 Options Considered

My Recommendation for Vue.js

My Recommendation for Vue.js

Much simpler, more flexible, less opinionated

Poor typescript support

Single File Components

Is not as complete as Angular

Lightweight

Not a complete solution

Similar syntax

Easy to read documentation

Reactive and thus very performant

Support for both templates and JSX

Can be used with any front-end stack

Fast

Supports inline templating

Can be made even lighter

CLI and Webpack integration

VueRouter

Easy to use state management

SEO friendly

Single file component

Responsive server-side rendering

Reactivity system

Vuex store, events system

My Recommendation for Aurelia

My Recommendation for Aurelia

Few abstractions

Small following

ES6 and HTML standards

Needs more support from the community

Simple and powerful

No big success stories yet

Great use of conventions

Self-paced training options are very limited right now

Fast

Does the right thing by default without boxing you in

Out of the box Typescript support

Works well with non ES6 libraries

Good binding system

Conventions over configurations

Standards compliant

Easy to use MVVM

Tasteful, moderate use of decorators

Easy to learn

Agnostic code

Powerful helper CLI available

Loader agnostic

Provides dependency injection

Growing community

Plays well with other frameworks

Can be customized to use different rendering engines

Commercial support

Allows developers to build their application however they want

Out of the box ES6 support

Data binding choices with sane defaults

Structure

Pretty good documentation

Variable binding helps with self-documenting the code

Great documentation

My Recommendation for React

My Recommendation for React

Easy to reuse components

Not a complete solution

Virtual DOM support

You have to learn a new syntax

Good debugging tools

Verbose

Can be used with different libraries

Slow

Small API

No support for legacy browsers

Tested on Facebook itself

Large file size

Easy to write tests

Anti-pattern. Mixes HTML into JS code

Unidirectional data flow

Renders too frequently

Unopinionated

Heavy on memory