Most popular frontend frameworks for web development in 2022

In this article, we have outlined the point of the frontend frameworks and their benefits, gathered the most popular and used frameworks along with explaining how to choose the most suitable for learning or your project implementation.

Frontend web development is a process of transforming the data to a graphical interface. Frontend frameworks simplify the development process and make it easier to build a website or an application. They provide various templates to interact with browser components, including prepared code that programmers can use to fix common programming tasks.

The frameworks are compatible with various libraries that boost the performance while reducing the amount of code required. They divide the code into many building blocks or modules which are self contained and can be reused. This also prevents bad practices like code duplication and simplifies unit testing.

These frameworks also specify the rules for developing the app architecture: they have a skeletal structure that is extended and changed according to the requirements. Developers don't have to start projects from scratch, as they already have a foundation to implement other project-specific features.

It is worth mentioning the frameworks for mobile development, where the most popular are React Native and Flutter. They allow for creating cross-platform applications from scratch and develop both interface and logic. We covered them in detail in our article about cross-platform mobile development.

For business today, having an attractive website or application becomes crucial to succeed. They strive to provide targeted audiences with the best experience during contact with their brand.

Using frameworks allows developers to create demand apps much faster and costly, that is very important for business owners. This interrelation affects the popularity of frameworks and increases the demand for frontend developers.

Below, we have gathered the most relevant benefits of using frontend frameworks.

Faster development time.

Reusable components and templates make the development time shorter, allow for updating specific parts of pages without changing the entire design, and enable launching apps faster. The frameworks allow developers to use tested and bug-free libraries without spending a lot of time finding bugs and fixing them.

Reduced code length.

Frameworks provide a component approach, dividing the code into modules that allow developers to save a lot of time and effort by reusing once developed components anywhere in the project.

Maintainability.

Frameworks break up an application into reusable and standalone components that simplify making quick changes that don’t affect the rest of the application. Using similar design patterns allows new developers to build and maintain an app easier.

Two-way data binding.

Some frontend frameworks, e.g. Angular supports two-way data binding out of the box that allows link data and the view. Any data-related changes affecting the model are immediately propagated to the matching view, and any changes made in the view are immediately reflected in the underlying model with no need to re-update the DOM on your own.

JavaScript is the most popular programming language used by software developers worldwide to make applications or websites interactive, as said in the Stack Overflow Survey. All modern web browsers have adopted JavaScript to add functionality to websites and web applications.

Using JavaScript frameworks, programmers can rapidly and effectively create intelligent and proficient-looking web applications. JavaScript makes it possible to build rich UI components such as image sliders, pop-ups, site navigation menus, form validations, tabs, and much more.

JavaScript's flexibility is best suited for intermediate developers. The language just helps get things done by allowing the developer to focus on solving the problem. The framework provides a mix of plugins and own code snippets to get an application working.

Moreover, JavaScript can run on both the client-side and the server-side, as well as on different devices.

We’ve listed 10 most popular frontend frameworks for web development, describing their pros and cons as well as key features.

Below, you can see how the trends for frameworks have changed over time based on their tags usage, according to the Stack Overflow statistics.

It's an open-source JavaScript framework released in 2013 by Facebook. It is intended for building web-applications with multiple dynamic components. The framework stands out with its own virtual DOM. React has reusable components framed in a tree-like structure and one-way data binding. It uses the JSX coding style, with a mix of HTML quotes and tag syntax, to create the components. It breaks down larger components into smaller ones that can be managed separately and individually.

These features allow developers to improve productivity and save time while designing an interactive interface.

React is regarded as one of the easiest frameworks to learn by its user-friendliness and smooth learning curve, which is ideal for beginners or less experienced developers.

Pros:

Cons:

Among the companies that use React except Facebook are Netflix, Salesforce, Dropbox.

It's an open-source component-based framework, released by Google in 2010, for developing dynamic and scalable web applications. With a collection of well-integrated libraries and tools, the framework allows developers to build, test, and modify the code. Angular provides a lot of helpful functional features, including directives, filters, two-way data binding, dependencies, and more.

Angular is versatile and performs well when building apps for different platforms at once. Code can be reused for SPAs and PWAs, web apps, mobile projects, as well as native desktop applications.

Angular is rapidly evolving and adding multiple features. Its popularity and usage are growing thanks to its high performance and huge community support. It provides an opportunity to scale single-page applications to enterprise-grade apps based on the company's needs. The framework increases the app's efficiency by dynamically updating the content using two-way data binding.

Pros:

Cons:

It's another open-source JavaScript framework, primarily recognized for the small size of documents and HTML-based syntax. It employs a component-based development model and enables attaching components to a project, and its MVVM architecture makes it easier to handle HTML blocks. The framework simplifies the binding of existing applications and provides extensive documentation.

The demand for Vue.js has picked up in a fairly short time and is still gaining popularity. Vue is one of the best JavaScript libraries, allowing to create interactive UI elements that are lightweight and easy to adapt, with a possibility for small projects to scale up to larger ones. It has a simple structure with its own command-line interface (CLI) for generating code, developing, and deploying an app. Vue provides data-reactive elements through a flexible and straightforward API.

The demand for Vue.js has picked up in a fairly short time and is still gaining popularity. It allows creating high-quality applications and adding functionality to them simple and quick.

Pros:

Cons:

jQuery makes interactions between JavaScript code and HTML and CSS elements easier and more consistent, allowing for making websites more interactive and dynamic.

jQuery makes tasks like event handling, Ajax, animation, document traversal, and manipulation much easier. Because jQuery excels at handling browser interchangeability, frontend developers don't have to be concerned about all cross-browser concerns.

Despite being introduced in 2006, jQuery remains to be very popular among developers. Because of its extensive usage on the web, a large community has been built around it and there are a lot of learning resources and examples available.

Pros:

Cons:

It's an innovative JavaScript compiler, designed in 2017 to produce high-performance user interfaces. No wonder the framework is gaining momentum because using it is very easy. Svelte doesn't employ a virtual DOM, the code written in Svelte gets compiled into a pure JavaScript. This allows Svelte to win in terms of speed against frameworks, such as React or Vue.

Svelte is a good choice if you need a small and quick application to be developed by a small team of frontend developers, including beginners. It is quite compatible with native HTML code and doesn’t impose a strict structure, which has also resulted in smaller application sizes. The modular nature of Svelte also enables developers to write components that use pure HTML, CSS and JS.

Pros:

Cons:

It's a JavaScript framework that is used to build fast web apps thanks to its static site and server-side rendering. The framework enables you to update the pages by re-rendering them in the background as traffic comes in thanks to Automatic Static Optimization, allowing static content to become dynamic. The framework is well suited for SEO thanks to server-side rendering.

Next.js enables developers to build web applications in a zero-config environment that provides all the tools they need out-of-the-box.

Nex.js t is considered as one of the fastest-growing React frameworks. It is used by big and popular companies like Netflix, Uber, and Starbucks. By the way, the Twelvedevs website is built using the Next framework too.

It's an open-source framework that helps create modern user interfaces for both scalable single-page and complex web apps. Ember.js adheres to the MVVM (model-view-view-model) pattern. Its tools enable designing a development environment, while its command-line interface gives tools for script automation. Moreover, Ember remains active in development, and what makes it special is the integrated backward compatibility.

While the framework is popular among web developers, it is quite flexible towards desktop and mobile apps, too.

It's an open source framework that makes frontend development easier by providing various building blocks such as models, views, events, routers and collections.

This framework is used to create responsive web and mobile applications in a properly structured format as well as build static and dynamic sites that are light on resource consumption.

Backbone communicates well with the current API via a RESTful JSON user interface. It has more than 100 extensions and plugins available to help improve web app quality.

Preact is a small-size framework with the same features as React, being its easier version. Being smaller, it employs the thinnest and fastest virtual DOM. Preact allows for comfortably using components between both frameworks.

The framework is a good choice to create a small application with no complex integrations that should perform a single function well.

It's a fast, lightweight, and reactive framework built on top of the Web Components standard providing speed and a small set of useful features. Lit is most often used to build PWAs with both simple and complex interfaces. It is a good choice for building web UI, pairing the inter op-based advantages of web components with a modern developer experience.

Lit provides fast updates thanks to keeping track of the UI’s dynamic parts and updates only when the underlying state changes, with no need to rebuild a whole virtual tree and diff it with the current state of the DOM.

The market of the frontend development is rather dynamic and changeable. Despite React, Angular, and Vue.js still being the leaders among the frontend frameworks, new frameworks and libraries are actively developed and gaining momentum.

Among the top global one million domains, these three frameworks are present on 20.1% of websites (812% growth compared to 2018). Even 68% in the top 10k global websites use them.

The best frontend framework should provide flexibility for further usage, while an end user should receive excellent UX and UI. As from the developer's point of view, the framework should be stable, flexible, rich in its functionality, and have good community support.

It's hard to tell which one is the best in common. It is highly important to analyze all the aspects of the frontend framework and make a well-considered decision to choose the appropriate one:

Functionality.

Find out whether the framework has sufficient functionality for the entire project implementation. The best choice would be a framework with sufficient but not excessive functionality suitable for a specific project.

Rich documentation.

Well-written documentation helps you learn and start using the framework in a short time. Using tutorials, guides and code samples will decrease your project development time.

Large community.

Community support plays a crucial role in any framework development. The more popular the framework becomes among developers and the more supportive community it forms, the faster it grows.

Flexibility.

Regardless of how feature-rich your framework is, you may need to supplement a project with other tools and libraries. In this way, having a flexible framework that can handle complex integration procedures is critical for the success of the project.

Suitability.

Check out available framework features before starting your web development. Explore the CLIs, libraries, and plugins supported by the framework and make sure they are applicable to upcoming projects.

Development technologies do not stand still, they are constantly evolving and improving. Once popular frameworks are being replaced by the new ones, giving even more opportunities to developers. The desire to simplify the development process, making it less resource-intensive and profitable for both customers and service providers, remains unchanged.

At Twelvedevs, we have extensive experience in creating eye-catching, high-performing applications. Contact us and get a free consultation and your project estimation within 24 hours.