React vs Vue: A Developer’s Journey Through Two Frameworks

I’ll never forget when I was a newbie diving into web development. I really went deep into HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript, and I don’t regret it one bit. Unlike many developers I meet today, I’m not scared of CSS because I actually learned it in depth. After mastering the fundamentals, React was next on my roadmap, and everyone around me stressed how essential it was to learn.

When I first started with React, I had this nagging question: Why do I need this when I can build everything with the skills I already know? Up to that point, everything I’d built was pretty much static with minimal server interactions. I kept questioning why I needed to think about state, why I had to adopt this new mental model. It wasn’t until I started building backend heavy web apps that I truly understood the importance of a framework like React.

To really appreciate what React offered, I decided to try building a dynamic, backend heavy app using just vanilla JavaScript with template literals and createElement. It’s definitely doable, but it quickly becomes a mess and is far from a clean solution. That’s when I really started to appreciate a tool like React and what it brings to the table.

The Vue Awakening

Fast forward to my first job. I walked in expecting to work with React, and all of a sudden, the project I was assigned to didn’t use React at all. They used Vue. I’d heard about Vue and knew it was a modern framework, but I’d never really bothered to see what it looked like. During my onboarding week, I went through the company’s internal documentation and started covering the gaps in my knowledge. The biggest gap? Vue.

I went through the official docs, watched an excellent tutorial from Traversy Media, built few simple apps and honestly, I felt confident with Vue in about three days. I could build anything with it. What struck me immediately was how different the experience felt.

The State Management Revelation

One thing I never liked about React was the lack of an easy state management solution. At the time, the most popular option was Redux, and it was… overwhelming. To set up a simple store, you had to write tons of boilerplate code. You needed actions, action creators, reducers, and a store configuration. Want to update a single piece of state? You’d write something like this:

// Action types
const INCREMENT = 'INCREMENT';

// Action creators
const increment = () => ({ type: INCREMENT });

// Reducer
const counterReducer = (state = 0, action) => {
  switch (action.type) {
    case INCREMENT:
      return state + 1;
    default:
      return state;
  }
};

// Store setup
const store = createStore(counterReducer);

And that’s just for incrementing a counter. The Redux style itself felt very confusing with its unidirectional data flow philosophy, middleware concepts, and the ceremony around every state change. Don’t get me wrong, Redux is powerful and teaches great patterns, but for someone coming from vanilla JavaScript, it felt like learning a completely new programming paradigm just to manage some data.

Then I encountered Vuex. It was a breath of fresh air. The same counter example looked like this:

const store = new Vuex.Store({
  state: {
    count: 0,
  },
  mutations: {
    increment(state) {
      state.count++;
    },
  },
});

It was simple, straightforward, and intuitive. You have state, you have mutations to change that state, and you have actions for async operations. The mental model was easier to grasp, and the amount of code you needed to write was significantly less. Vuex felt like it was designed with developer experience in mind from the ground up. At that point, I remember thinking, “Why would I go back to React when I have this clean and simple framework?”

I think my perspective is unique because from my early days, I had to juggle between these two frameworks. Most developers lock into one ecosystem early on, but I got to experience both approaches when they mattered most, during my formative years as a developer.

The Hooks Question

When React introduced Hooks in version 16.8, I noticed something interesting. I’d look at React code and see functions wrapped in useCallback and calculations wrapped in useMemo, and I started wondering: Why doesn’t Vue have equivalents for these? How does Vue handle the same performance scenarios without these hooks?

That question led me down a rabbit hole of understanding how fundamentally different these frameworks actually are under the hood.

Different Philosophies, Different Trade-offs

As I dug deeper, I realized these two frameworks are built on fundamentally different philosophies. Vue has always included a compiler that transforms templates into optimized render functions. React, on the other hand, started as a view library that relied more on manual optimization and developer discipline.

Vue’s compiler and reactivity system work together beautifully. The reactivity system automatically tracks dependencies, and the compiler generates optimized code that minimizes re-renders. React’s approach is more explicit. You need to tell it when to optimize, when to memoize, when to skip updates.

Let me show you a real example. Imagine you have a filterable list of items where you need to pass a filter function to a child component:

React approach:

function ProductList({ products }) {
  const [searchTerm, setSearchTerm] = useState('');

  // Without useCallback, this creates a new function on every render
  // causing child component to re-render unnecessarily
  const handleFilter = useCallback(
    (product) => {
      return product.name.toLowerCase().includes(searchTerm.toLowerCase());
    },
    [searchTerm]
  );

  // Without useMemo, this recalculates on every render
  // even when products or searchTerm haven't changed
  const filteredProducts = useMemo(() => {
    return products.filter(handleFilter);
  }, [products, handleFilter]);

  return (
    <div>
      <SearchInput value={searchTerm} onChange={setSearchTerm} />
      <ProductGrid products={filteredProducts} onFilter={handleFilter} />
    </div>
  );
}

Vue approach:

<template>
  <div>
    <SearchInput v-model="searchTerm" />
    <ProductGrid :products="filteredProducts" :on-filter="handleFilter" />
  </div>
</template>

<script setup>
import { ref, computed } from 'vue';

const searchTerm = ref('');

// Vue's reactivity system automatically tracks that this depends on searchTerm
// No need to declare dependencies manually
const handleFilter = (product) => {
  return product.name.toLowerCase().includes(searchTerm.value.toLowerCase());
};

// computed automatically caches and only recalculates when dependencies change
// No need to list dependencies explicitly
const filteredProducts = computed(() => {
  return props.products.filter(handleFilter);
});
</script>

The Vue version is not only shorter, but you don’t have to think about dependency arrays or decide what needs to be memoized. Vue’s reactivity system tracks that filteredProducts depends on props.products and searchTerm, and the compiler ensures the child component only re-renders when the actual data changes, not when function references change.

That’s where the difference really shows in day to day development. In React, you’re often splitting your attention between business logic and performance tweaks. You’re constantly deciding: Should I wrap this function in useCallback? Should this calculation use useMemo? Will this cause unnecessary re-renders?

If you overuse these hooks, you clutter your code and hurt readability. If you forget them in the right places, you may introduce subtle performance issues that only show up under specific conditions. It’s a constant balancing act.

In Vue, that entire layer of decision making simply doesn’t exist. You focus on solving the problem at hand, and Vue’s runtime and compiler handle the granular optimizations behind the scenes. You write your component logic, and Vue figures out the most efficient way to update the DOM.

Of course, Vue isn’t magic. Inefficient patterns or massive reactive structures can still impact performance. But Vue’s design removes a lot of the low level optimization overhead that React pushes onto the developer. Vue abstracts these performance details in the same way a high level language abstracts away memory management, while still delivering comparable or even superior runtime performance.

Keeping It Real

I didn’t want to make this blog about downgrading React, and that’s not what this is. This is just a factual comparison based on my experience with both frameworks. I don’t favor Vue or any other framework or programming language. I’m agnostic 😄

React is much more widely used and definitely has a richer ecosystem. The job market for React developers is larger, there are more libraries, more resources, more Stack Overflow answers. Vue is catching up lately, and its ecosystem is growing steadily, but React’s head start gives it a significant advantage in terms of community and tooling.

And React is evolving. Some sources claim upcoming React versions will optimize automatically, handling much of what developers currently do manually with useCallback and useMemo. If that pans out, it could narrow one of the biggest developer experience gaps between these frameworks.

The Takeaway

Both frameworks are excellent tools that can build amazing applications. React’s explicit nature teaches you a lot about how things work under the hood. Vue’s implicit optimizations let you focus more on features and less on framework mechanics.

Choose React if you want the largest ecosystem, the most job opportunities, and don’t mind thinking about optimizations. Choose Vue if you value simplicity, want to write less boilerplate, and prefer a framework that handles more for you automatically.

Or better yet, learn both. Understanding different approaches makes you a better developer, regardless of which tool you end up using day to day.