When comparing Vue.js vs Ember, the Slant community recommends Vue.js for most people. In the question“What are the best client-side JavaScript MV* frameworks?” Vue.js is ranked 1st while Ember is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose Vue.js is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Single file component
Very useful.
Pro Lightweight
Vue.js weighs in at 16kb min+gzip.
Pro Vuex store, events system
Pro Reactivity system
Pro CLI and Webpack integration
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pro VueRouter
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Pro Completely community based
Pro One of the fastest template rendering engines (new glimmer)
Pro Easy to understand documentation
The Ember Guides are well structured and very well written. The API documentation is also fantastic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pro New router has less boilerplate code
Ember's new router need much less boilerplate code that it previously did.
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.
Pro Works great with jQuery
You can use any of jQuery’s features.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cons
Con Poor typescript support
Very basic typescript support.
Con Very enterpris-ey in design and tooling
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.
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.