Ember vs Svelte: Comparing Performance, Architecture And More

Every front-end development project requires a radical new approach in building innovative user-interface at a faster rate given the demand for web applications today. Be it developing an interactive user-interface, command-line interface, or a menu-driven interface; The ultimate goal is to create a web app that allows effective communication between the user and the operating system. To ensure the achievement of such a purpose, choosing the right web application framework is very important. Ember and Svelte are both JavaScript-based frameworks, but they are vastly different in terms of the potential to build a simplified feature-rich web app or a complicated advanced web app. 

This article will help you answer all your questions regarding Ember vs. Svelte if you are in the dilemma of making a tough decision regarding choosing the right web framework for your next project under time constraints, limited budget, development team, and more. Feel free to connect with our web app development expert to discuss your project to get exclusive insights.

Ember is a JavaScript-based front-end framework widely used for building potential applications that require rich in-app interactions, including complex functionality. For building customized and complex Single Page Applications (SPAs), Ember is often preferred. Developing interactive applications without making the code look messy is one of the possibilities that Ember offers. Emberjs is also known for eliminating boilerplate in coding. Writing programs with fewer iterations is one of the options provided by Ember.

Here are some market usage statistics for Ember js:

• There are currently more than 122,996 successful websites that use Ember globally. 
• 28.9% of the majority of websites that use Ember prefer Version v3.7, and the market share held by the framework is not more than 0.1% overall. 
• The community of Ember is approximately 21.6k, with 4.2k forked projects.
  

Use cases of Ember

• Large scale applications 
• DDAU (Data Down, Actions Up) application 
• Web applications 
• Long-term projects 
• Single Page Apps 

What popular apps built with Ember?

Netflix: Ember batch request library has been extensively used to create automatic batches of file creation, updates, and unnecessary bulk data deletion under just one API call click.  

Microsoft: Seamless usage of Ember components to create Power BI features to create interactive visualizations and engaging user interface with intuitive dashboards. 

LinkedIn: Improved flow of content and easily searchable content for Help center using Ember stack to build in-product help widgets that boast users with a personalized experience. 

TED: Ability to allow developers to create open-sourced projects for TED and vast usage of DDAU architecture to create quicker components rendering with authentic DOM elements. 

Twitch: Complete transformation of the inner functioning of Twitch by re-writing the client-side application framework to provide a complex and yet a high-performance SPA without any server delay.

Svelte is a Javascript web framework that doesn’t do virtual DOM diffing, unlike other Javascript frameworks. Instead, it compiles and converts UI components into a highly efficient imperative code that directly updates the DOM. This feature lets developers build intuitive user interfaces with excellent performance characteristics. 

Here are some market usage statistics for Svelte:

There are approximately 3151 live websites built with Svelte. Among which 14 websites are in the top 10k, 177 in the top 1 million, and 57 websites are among the top 100k websites on the internet, which is a good number even in its foundation phase; the framework has ranked among the best. source

Use cases of Svelte

• Single-page applications 
• Interactive visualization i.e., apps that require data visualization through video 
• Web app for limited internet connection and low-intensity devices 

What popular apps are made with Svelte?

TeamSpeak– The all-new next-generation gaming platform providing voice interface worldwide with its extensive features, free tools use Svelte in its completely redesigned, re-engineered user interface. 

Houses Of World is a unique project to explore houses across the world that uses Svelte in its interactive user interface. 

Doka by PQINA is a high-performing image editing software built for editing images, a client-side transformation of images, crop overlays, and more features. It’s a great user experience delivering software to convert images into the desired look that developers can easily integrate into their websites. 

Tableplop is a browser-based online virtual tabletop to roleplay the games and interact with game players throughout different gaming activities like track initiative or rolling a dice. The application’s frontend is built with Svelte.

Let’s compare Ember and Svelt to analyze their advantages and limitations.

Pros of Ember

Elegant UI: Ability to create modernistic front-end applications with semantic UI elements and fewer query codes, including the usage of lightweight components which can empower designers and developers.  

Faster development: Development time of large applications is considerably short with improved build time. It is made possible by generating enhanced CSS visibility and convenient source mapping of SCSS to reduce code downloads and parsing. 

Dedicated community: Proactive community that dedicates constant resources and repositories to discuss new features, track questions to instigate conversions, improve the Ember ecosystem, and request community inputs (RFCs). 

MVC and DDAU architecture: Ember follows two kinds of architectures today. In the past, it followed the MVC framework that majorly allowed automatic data updates within an application without the need for JSON and external APIs. Today it follows the DDAU pattern to emphasize the unidirectional data flow. 

Router feasibility: The ability to access and get the requested data by using Ember to pass the said data through a request to route handler and necessary application templates is much easier than other frameworks. 

Cons of Ember 

Code configuration: Conventional approach of code configuration in Ember does not provide much room for customization of pre-generated URLs or back-end APIs. Ember allows developers to integrate customized external components or elements only to some extent. 

Rendering: Applications built with Ember are believed to render at a slower pace during the startup of an application than most other frameworks resulting in lagged response though eventually, the performance picks up after a few seconds of delay.  

Integration difficulty: Ember has its advantages in providing design choices, but it also proves to be difficult for being integrated with other MVC frameworks. During integration, Ember makes it harder for identifying elements that lie within the application for testing and shimming.  

API limitations: If a non-restful API is used in an Ember application, the chances of performance issues and data call back via API rises as well. Ember works well with Rest adapter but not with non-restful APIs. Making requests to pull complex or external links from the backend might be challenging with Ember. 

Project feasibility: The computation of Ember is considered complicated and heavy in terms of coding and size in most cases. It is best suitable for large projects and not advisable to be chosen for small-time projects. 

Pros of Svelte js 

Automatic updates- It has a great technique to declare variables that update the user interface automatically with the change in data, eliminating the need to wait for the virtual structure to reflect and then process the changes in the UI.

Less code– one of the main USPs of Svelte is its less code. The framework is more into writing real business logic without adding additional code complexities. 

No Virtual structure/DOM- makes application even faster, resulting in faster user experience and increasing user engagement. 

Brilliantly lightweight framework– it uses modern Javascript, making the framework seamlessly lightweight (4.1KB minified.) 

Readable and straightforward- it generates high-quality, readable, and yet compact code. Easier development and maintenance whenever an application needs. Resources joining or leaving the team won’t make a hassle. Anyone can join the project and start working without giving much thought to understanding complexity. 

Cons of Svelte js

Limited best practices– the framework is under development. The core team of Svelte is still working towards making it a better platform for developers to use. 

Limited user base– the community is growing, and the development of the framework is underway. So, you could currently see a few projects running under the framework and not full-fledged popularity. 

Lack of tools- The framework doesn’t possess mature tools for debugging and testing the application. The ecosystem of Svelte is still growing and may not fulfill the current requirements of projects. 

User experience- Svelte does not serve priority-based content in the user interface. It means serving the concurrent requests about displaying the content or loading sequences is not yet managed by Svelte. So it might struggle when users try to load multiple contents in the UI. 

While performance should not be a killer factor for small projects, it becomes extremely important to consider it when building complex and large projects. With that being said, let’s compare Ember and Svelte in terms of performance.

How does Ember stand out in terms of performance?

Ember is a heavyweight framework that is known for its complicated tools and components that is commonly preferred for building large-scale applications. This complexity makes it easier for handling advanced functions of an application, but it results in lag when the application is launched. It takes a few seconds before it can start running smoothly. However, the overall performance of Ember is high. The two-way binding and server-side rendering features of Ember provide the possibility to function as a Glimmer rendering engine. As a result, it can build rapid rendering speeds. In the future, Ember might resolve the initial lag issues as well. 

How does Svelte stand out in terms of performance?

Svelte is a well-optimized framework from the developer’s perspective. It offers awesome flexibility to produce high-quality code that just performs awesome. It optimizes user code at compile time. It means applications have minimum runtime overhead- taking the users to have the maximum benefit of super-fast loading and UI navigation. 

There’s a lot of opportunities where Svelte makes inexpensive efforts to bring app performance than other frameworks. This compile-time framework focuses on reducing the overhead without dealing with the optimizations related to Virtual DOM. It means Svelte offers great performance without even falling into the complexity of Virtual DOM overhead and concurrent modes.

When choosing a framework, it’s important to choose flexibility and avoid any strict enforcement of architecture and guidelines.  As a matter of fact, it’s always recommended to treat a framework as a guide, not methods, and standards. That said, let’s juxtapose Ember and Svelte to check whether they are flexible in terms of architecture. 

What kind of architecture does Ember support?

The older versions of Ember follow the MVC architecture pattern. Here’s what M,V, and C stands for:

Model: Provides the objects and elements of the application to wrap database records quickly.

View: View components of Ember by default functions as the Ember template, which uses the templating language such as Handlebars. This way of structure allows Ember to easily inject data into the view part of an application dynamically.

Controller: Unlike most frameworks, in Ember, the route handlers take care of the controller tasks such as getting the data and passing to the view components. 

The newer version of Ember follows the architecture of component-service as well in some cases to provide asynchronous functioning and handle multiple processes simultaneously. 

What kind of architecture does Svelte support?

At this point in time, there isn’t any useful information in the official docs regarding the architectural aspects of applications built with Svelte. Under the hood, Svelte is excellently designed to interpret quicker user interface inputs.   Since Svelte acts as a compiler to render the page using existing javascript,  it eliminates the middle steps of loading a virtual structure before reflecting the data into the real user interface. Here’s why it’s faster than other frameworks when it comes to building user interfaces., Svelte makes the process a lot faster in terms of serving the content to the users pertaining to this feature. 

To be able to work without a glitch under continuous, high load, and growing market expectations, your application development project needs to go through a series of tests to ensure compliance with the UI standards, compatibility, and usability. Here’s how Ember vs Svelte stands out when compared with testing. 

How is the testing environment for Ember?

Ensuring an application is bug-free right from the development stage is one of the beneficial aspects of Ember. It provides developers with the power to write tests in a manner that can help quick and automatic refactoring code faster and easier. In other words, manual testing is not much required with Ember. Some of the tools that Ember offers for testing are Qunit, Qunit DOM, Mocha, Chai DOM. The best feature of this framework is that the CLI suggests the type of testing you should undertake based on the setup of your application program. 

How is the testing environment for Svelte?

If you are more inclined to the “lean web” idea, Svelte is more about your liking. It is safe to say that Svelte is more about contributing small size libraries and less complicated computations. Considering this pattern, you could write more testable code in Svelte than other front-end frameworks, since the frontend is more about how users feel and interact with your web application.  

Svelte is more business-friendly by generating testable code. It pushes the idea to write unit tests and offers a Svelte testing library, a very lightweight solution for testing Svelte components. 

Frameworks significantly influence the web application scalability; therefore, the right choice of framework is important. Here’s how Ember and Svelte stand out in terms of scalability.

Is Ember scalable? 

Ember does provide a wide range of tools creating opportunities to build scalable applications. Ember is most commonly preferred for building ambitious applications after all. The MVVM architecture of this framework can provide flexibility without compromising the code composability feature and this provides the ability to render countless data codes with high performance simultaneously. In other words, it proves to support scalability that also suits for developing large scale applications or extending an existing application. 

Is Svelte scalable?

With a compiler-based characteristic, it’s safe to say that Svelte is not the perfect solution to build scalable applications. But since it can be used in conjunction with other frameworks, there are speculations that it can contribute to building scalable and reusable components.  

Both Ember and Svelte offer official documents, guidelines, open-source projects, third-party libraries, and plugins to support developers throughout the development process. Let’s compare how Ember vs Svelte fare against each other in terms of building complex apps.

Can you build complex apps with Ember?

Ember is, after all, a server-side rendering focused framework. It provides the necessary tools, plugins, external dependencies required to build a complex or an advanced application in a feasible manner. In the past, Ember allowed the possibility to follow MVVM architecture, which allowed quicker creation of complex multi-page applications. Today it follows the MVC pattern and extends the framework by allowing components to access the DDAU functionality pattern. This makes it perfect for building large-scale applications, although stacking the components in a structural manner by default is something that Ember might lack today. 

Can you build complex apps with Svelte?

Svelte is not yet at the stage of building complex web apps. It builds a cybernetically enhanced app; you will be fascinated to see how Svelte js process the components in user interfaces. Other frameworks might have a record dealing with input blocking events, while Svelte hasn’t proved proficient in a particular domain. 

How security is handled in Ember? 

Ember strictly follows security precautions by undertaking the regulation practices set by the Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Tokens. CSRF practices ensure that Ember applications can be protected against attacks such as content-security attacks, cross-site scripting. Unlike most frameworks, Ember has a strict Security Policy in place that helps the handlebars of an application to automatically prevent attacks like XSS as well. 

How security is handled in Svelte js?

To this date, there are no listed prerequisites in the official Svelte document w.r.t security updates and guidelines. 

User experience is a vital element in choosing the right framework for your project. It aims to provide positive experiences that keep users loyal to the product or brand. Additionally, a meaningful user experience allows you to define customer journeys on your website that are most conducive to business success.

Ember’s way of delivering the best User-experience

Building a rich UI interface is another advantage of using Ember. The community of this framework often evidently proves the fact that Ember is possibly even meant for designers. In other frameworks, most concerns lie on DOM regarding the page refresh time based on which design is created and adjusted for an application. But, since Ember can easily create countless design models, the knowledge on UX can be focused on the live updating of a page, which gives more room for creating intuitive and creative UI, which in turn increases the experience of the user. Ember documents provide valuable suggestions on more ways to improve the user experience productively. 

Svelte’s ability to give the best user experience

Svelte is an aesthetically built smart UI framework. The aesthetics of its features, syntax, and framework architecture aids into the positive and powerful end-user experience. It is welcoming to solve problems of scaling web applications and accepting volunteering contributions worldwide. 

The additional improvement in technology is its speed and reliability of components pattern. It supports modern component-based user interfaces design with a reduced loading time (by eliminating the middle stage of loading the virtual structure/DOM.) Plus, the application weighs very low when compiled, it speeds up the loading speed, unlike other frameworks. The user experience is fast, smooth, and functional with the reduced speed and quick serving of displaying content.

For projects where low Time to Market (TTM) is essential, it’s imperative to look out whether the framework you choose offers rapid development or not. In our experience, it’s even more important when your team doesn’t have time to learn a new framework or technology. Having said that, let’s uncover whether Ember js and Svelte offer rapid development or not. 

At what pace can Ember applications be built? 

The architecture of Ember makes rapid development very much possible. Given the in-built integrated development toolkit of Ember, any application built with this framework can undergo rapid iteration as well. The robust Ember CLI serves as an in-built development environment that makes building pipelines for an application quickly. It can manage the complexity in modern web applications with one single command, making it ready to deploy at a faster rate. By using external tools that support two-way binding, Ember applications can be made to function at a rapid pace reducing the time taken by the application response during the initial launch.

How Svelte contributes to rapid application development?

Here the elimination of extra compilation of code happens. Svelte removes the need to compile the code before the final user interface is seen to the users. Hence, the elimination of this extra task improves the user experience as well as developer experience. It reduces the loading time and increases the developers’ productivity and by default, speedier user experience, and no extra chunks of code to load the framework at runtime. 

The selection of a framework can have a large impact on the size of an application code. For a large project, the application size should dominate the framework size. Less size is always more in this case. Let’s map out the difference between Ember and Svelte in terms of application size. 

What is Ember’s application-size?

Ember is a bulky framework. With this framework, building a large-scale application or a complicated enterprise app requires advanced tools, elements, and libraries. When all the required components are used, Ember turns out to be more prominent in size than you might expect. By choosing the right tools, the size of the application can be made smaller, but still, the core bundle of the app might remain large despite any removal of adjustments made with external libraries and tools used. Even a straightforward basic application built Ember v1.0 turns out to be at a size of 272kB. However, for larger projects, this fact is overlooked considering the high performance and rich UI Ember can offer. 

What’s the size of the application built in Svelte?

Svelte creates smaller sizes of applications. Svelte builds smaller bundle sizes of apps, and by that, it is recognized as the most accessible Javascript component library to run the development more productively. 

A framework should be easier to maintain and adapt. In terms of application development, maintainability means that your developers can easily analyze the code and proceed in fixing errors, thus implementing the correct functionality. That said, let’s analyze how maintainable the code is in the case of Ember and Svelte.

What is code maintainability for Ember? 

Coding practices that Ember follows proves to be a much better choice when it comes to code maintenance. The components within an Ember application might be disorganized, but still attempt to standardize the entire application layout by creating static setups that need not be changed often. This allows automatic maintenance of codes, components and even supports automatic testing capacities. Despite all this, Ember tends to spread its inner component dependency field all over the application code. So, when it comes to initial implementation or keeping track of maintenance, the job of code maintenance might look like a train wreck. 

What is code maintainability for Svelte? 

Svelte adheres to modern application development. Every application built with Svelte is made up of components, and the app itself a unique component. Svelte manages the code by letting these components stay separate while still maintaining the decency to get displayed as one and work seamlessly. You could see in apps built with Svelte having multiple components say button, text box or form are all working consistently to give a consistent user experience. 

Developers reuse these components into one and another condition to speed up the process. It is relatively easy for developers to maintain the app structure. 

The learning curve can help organizations to understand the time frame required for the developers to become proficient in the framework. It is important while choosing a framework as organizations can better perceive the situation and foresee whether the developers require training support or time to practice the framework before start working with it. Let’s find out how Ember vs Svelte fare against each other in terms of the learning curve.

How easy is it to learn Ember? 

The major drawback of Ember is the steep learning curve of the framework. The MVC pattern is not hard to learn or understand, but it follows a complicated standardized pattern of adopting functions and tools. For someone who is not well versed with Ember already might find it challenging to learn at the initial stages. The current documentation of Ember is not so bad, but yet it is not up to the mark of making beginners feel it is easy to grasp the functionality of Ember. For example, the router and controller functionality mix-up helps an Ember application to increase the performance, but it makes the learning process confusing for a novice.

How good is the learning curve of Svelte for developers?

Svelte has an easy to go learning curve. No prior knowledge of Javascript code or additional typescript knowledge is required. JSX is no barrier. Developers slightly introduced with Javascript can also go along with the framework. Reusable components with individual HTML, CSS, and Javascript code are fundamental to building apps with Svelte. New developers are welcome to join the club!

How convenient is it to hire Ember developers?

The developer experience and understandability of Ember is a vital factor to keep in mind while hiring developers. The framework by itself might appear to be complicated and advanced. Hiring a novice might just prolong your development time and eat up the budget through your nose. Even if you consider hiring only one expert Ember developer, it is not only sufficient considering the vast build nature of the framework. You might require five or more Ember developers to build and maintain a long-lived Ember project successfully. Also, hiring a full-time Ember developer might not be cost-effective unless you are willing to spend beyond the roof. In such cases, consider extending your development team by hiring companies that provide Ember development services. 

How convenient is it to hire Svelte developers?

Since the very essential knowledge required for building applications with Svelte is only HTML, CSS, and Javascript, hiring Svelte developers should not be a daunting task for your business. The average cost of hiring Svelte developers is between $20 to $40, while the average cost of frontend developers varies between $15 to $50.