I actively use both, and I actively detest ever working on the React parts of the codebase, and look forward to any and all Vue tickets, even the crappy ones like refactoring untyped 5k LoC Vue components.
People always bring out the bigger community or whatever in React, but IMO that's a huge big red negative against React. Every single React project will have its own way of dealing with state & routing at a minimum, which are the two things that should basically be identical regardless of the application (unless we're talking some hyper-specific circumstances, but for 99% of projects out there a golden path would be more than enough). There's lots of different patterns out there, and to this day you've got people wondering WTF is even going on with the 27 different state management libraries and 6 different Router libraries available to you. For miscellaneous packages, the only ones that I feel Vue is really missing out on would be things like Framer Motion which is a bit of a shame, but for the most part, 99% of most JS libraries out there will work just fine in Vue, especially Vue 3. We use Three.js a lot in our Vue 3 app and it works flawlessly, as it would in any other framework.
You automatically get better performance straight out the gate with Vue. In large apps, unless you have a React wizard who does nothing but optimize the React code 24/7, Vue will still be faster without you having to contort yourself into pacifying the framework. It's leaner both bundle-wise and logic-wise. There are far, far fewer footguns in Vue, the worst case is usually some weird quirkiness with deeply nested reactive objects, but even that is pretty rare in my experience. In a React codebase you're pretty much guaranteed to run into some reactivity footgun sooner rather than later, and it can often be a complete nightmare to deal with.
Don't even get me started on the whole Vercel bullshit, where they basically took over the project and are now pushing change after change that benefit Vercel and nobody else. The whole SSR meme needs to die, IMO, it has been such a clusterfuck of unnecessary complexity.
I also personally think the Vue docs are miles better than the new React docs, but this one's probably up to personal taste, as I see some people in this thread that prefer the React docs. Similarly with JSX, this comes down purely to personal preference. I prefer SFCs, some people prefer JSX.
Some things that React is better at, to keep this rant fair(ish):
- Undeniably better TS support. CompAPI has helped a ton and Vue has caught up a lot, but React still eeks out
- The community aspect, as in people posting guides and articles about it, is much bigger. Though in my experience most of these types of articles/posts/guides are long outdated or promote terrible practices (again, due to how easy it is to hit a footgun in React)
- Tooling and editor support is better for React, though with WebStorm I don't feel like it's that bad in Vue. No clue of the state of things on different IDEs.
- Despite my issues with Next and Vercel specifically, it's still IMO better than Nuxt. I haven't used Nuxt professionally, but at least for personal projects it feels quite buggy and unstable. Bare/"vanilla" Vue vs "vanilla" React is no contest though, Vue wins by a mile
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I actively use both, and I actively detest ever working on the React parts of the codebase, and look forward to any and all Vue tickets, even the crappy ones like refactoring untyped 5k LoC Vue components.
People always bring out the bigger community or whatever in React, but IMO that's a huge big red negative against React. Every single React project will have its own way of dealing with state & routing at a minimum, which are the two things that should basically be identical regardless of the application (unless we're talking some hyper-specific circumstances, but for 99% of projects out there a golden path would be more than enough). There's lots of different patterns out there, and to this day you've got people wondering WTF is even going on with the 27 different state management libraries and 6 different Router libraries available to you. For miscellaneous packages, the only ones that I feel Vue is really missing out on would be things like Framer Motion which is a bit of a shame, but for the most part, 99% of most JS libraries out there will work just fine in Vue, especially Vue 3. We use Three.js a lot in our Vue 3 app and it works flawlessly, as it would in any other framework.
You automatically get better performance straight out the gate with Vue. In large apps, unless you have a React wizard who does nothing but optimize the React code 24/7, Vue will still be faster without you having to contort yourself into pacifying the framework. It's leaner both bundle-wise and logic-wise. There are far, far fewer footguns in Vue, the worst case is usually some weird quirkiness with deeply nested reactive objects, but even that is pretty rare in my experience. In a React codebase you're pretty much guaranteed to run into some reactivity footgun sooner rather than later, and it can often be a complete nightmare to deal with.
Don't even get me started on the whole Vercel bullshit, where they basically took over the project and are now pushing change after change that benefit Vercel and nobody else. The whole SSR meme needs to die, IMO, it has been such a clusterfuck of unnecessary complexity.
I also personally think the Vue docs are miles better than the new React docs, but this one's probably up to personal taste, as I see some people in this thread that prefer the React docs. Similarly with JSX, this comes down purely to personal preference. I prefer SFCs, some people prefer JSX.
Some things that React is better at, to keep this rant fair(ish):
- Undeniably better TS support. CompAPI has helped a ton and Vue has caught up a lot, but React still eeks out
- The community aspect, as in people posting guides and articles about it, is much bigger. Though in my experience most of these types of articles/posts/guides are long outdated or promote terrible practices (again, due to how easy it is to hit a footgun in React)
- Tooling and editor support is better for React, though with WebStorm I don't feel like it's that bad in Vue. No clue of the state of things on different IDEs.
- Despite my issues with Next and Vercel specifically, it's still IMO better than Nuxt. I haven't used Nuxt professionally, but at least for personal projects it feels quite buggy and unstable. Bare/"vanilla" Vue vs "vanilla" React is no contest though, Vue wins by a mile