Ember vs Vue Comparison: Which is Better?

Vue is a progressive framework that encourages the incremental development of SPAs and other application user interfaces effectively. On the other hand, Ember is a modernistic framework preferred for developing web apps with rich UI that can function across any device. Both frameworks provide sufficient scalability and future-proof opportunities, but which is the best for your web app development? Is it Ember, the battle-tested framework? Or is it Vue, the development-friendly monolithic framework? 

By the end of this Ember vs Vue article, you will be able to choose the right front-end framework for your project as we will be comparing every essential and crucial aspect of both frameworks in this blog. In case you’ve already chosen a suitable framework and want to kickstart your project, consider browsing through Simform’s custom web application development offerings.

What is Ember js? – An overview

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

Here are some market usage statistics for Ember js:

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

Use cases of Ember js:

• Ambitious web applications with more native features 
• Single-page apps 
• Apps requiring a Python-like development environment
• Integration of complex functionalities
• Long-lived projects

Popular apps built with Ember:

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

Microsoft: Ember components seamlessly create Power BI features, interactive visualizations, and engage user interface with intuitive dashboards. 

LinkedIn: Improved content flow and searchability for Help center using Ember stack. Built in-product help widgets that  personalized user experience. 

TED: Enabled developers to develop open-sourced projects for TED. In addition to this, DDAU architecture was extensively used to create quicker components rendering with authentic DOM elements. 

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

You can find more information about Ember in our React vs Ember comparison blog.

What is Vue js? – An overview

Vue is a lightweight and flexible JavaScript-based framework that offers advanced web tools to develop modernistic SPAs and front-end web apps. It’s also considered versatile and progressive because it allows change creation in an application code without influencing core features. This gives you an opportunity to create a progressive UI.  Vue also extends the functionalities of a web application with high decoupling, customized modules, and visual components. 

Here are some market usage statistics for Vue: 

• There are currently more than 1,523,449 successful websites that use Vue globally.  
• 88.9% of the websites that use Vue prefer Vue v2.
• The market share held by the framework is not more than 0.5% overall. 
• The community of Vue is approximately 174k with 26.7k forked projects. 

Use cases of Vue:

• Progressive web apps 
• Single-page apps 
• Small project applications 
• Large scale enterprise apps 
• Existing application design extension 
• Existing application functionality extension

Popular apps built with Vue

Grammarly: Used data binding and template engine syntax to create necessary IDE features for building an intuitive and understandable online editor wrapped with simplistic design and contextual layout. 

Laravel Spark: Seamless functioning of front-end application on the client-side. It offered complete control over SaaS applications and supplemented custom-built Vue components for creating bulky features for the Primer client version of Laravel Spark.  

Behance: Created custom solutions that can uniformly tend to the application code and standardized application with each new visual feature added over the year. Most of all, Behance adopted Vue to create a roster shift between their developers. 

Gitlab: Implemented complex features that supported the community to improve their reporting, administration, code management, and analytics. GitLab conducted a slow migration of Vue for its simplicity in creating advanced components without exerting too much effort. 

Adobe Portfolio: Migrated from a legacy framework without data loss or complication. With the help of Vue, Adobe built customized tools that allowed users to develop modernized websites via Adobe creatives. 

Pros and Cons difference between Ember vs Vue

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

Pros of Ember js

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

Faster development: Development time of large applications is considerably short with improved build time. It generates 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 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: Access and get the requested data by using Ember to pass the said data through a request. Routing handlers and application templates is simpler with Ember than other frameworks. 

Cons of Ember js 

Code configuration: Conventional code configuration 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 render at a slower pace during the startup of an application than most other frameworks. This results in a lagged response though the performance picks up after a few seconds of delay.  

Integration difficulty: Ember has its advantages in providing design choices, but it’s also difficult to integrate with other MVC frameworks. During integration, Ember makes it hard to identify 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 arise. Ember works well with a 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 applications but not advisable for small-time projects. 

Pros of Vue 

Progressive: Vue can be gradually migrated or integrated into the code while developing components without wasting any development time. 

Conventional: Vue makes writing boilerplate code effortless by using in-built solutions to create state support for managing components and animations. The conventional approach makes the whole development process with Vue faster. 

Effective Size: With every new version of Vue that gets released, the framework gets lighter and faster. The optimization ability of Vue allows developers to focus more on feature additions than debugging or code tweaking. 

Functional Extension: Vue offers a set of additive API features that are function-based, which allow the composition of component logic to be flexible and extensive. As a result, application components become more readable and extendable in functionality.

Future Ready: Vue is known for its strong production environment, and thus there is not a need for updating or regularly checking the application for bug fixes or improvements. The framework update is easier by default. 

Cons of Vue 

Community: Vue has a community that lacks language understandability. With Vue being popular in regions around China, most of the discussions are in Chinese, making it difficult for English-speaking developers to learn the framework and share resources. 

Code Reactivity: The two-way binding nature of Vue comes in handy to create and sync components across an application. This results in the rendering of data chunks or parts of features triggered by the DOM. 

Support: Vue is still considered as a young framework. Since its community is relatively small, developers face challenges handling issues that arise for large-scale projects. 

Flexibility Risk: Having flexibility and options to customize is always reasonable, but Vue offers too much flexibility. It is often perceived as a framework where too many options over-complicate a project, leading to errors and code irregularities. 

Resource limitation: Though Vue’s ecosystem is wide, it still does not offer plugins and tools that are commonly compatible with most of the external tool sources and other frameworks. It also lacks support for most of the available resources. 

Check out for more information about Ember in this blog on Ember vs Angular Comparison.

Performance comparison for Ember vs Vue

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 js and Vue in terms of performance.

How is Ember js in providing application performance? 

Ember is a heavyweight framework that is known for its complicated tools and components that is commonly preferred for building large-scale applications. Although this complexity makes it easier for handling advanced functions, it lags 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 function as a Glimmer rendering engine, enabling rapid rendering speeds. In the future, Ember might resolve the initial lag issues as well.

How does Vue stand out in terms of performance?

With each new feature added or extension of a component, the condition of a Vue application becomes uncertain, making it harder for the app to load faster. But luckily, this framework has a virtual DOM, which serves as a default tool that optimizes the performance of an application. Lazy loading, for one, is a prominent feature of Vue that helps in improving the load time. Vue manages a third-party library asynchronously by handling critical dependencies. It segregates libraries into the main application bundle and leftover routes away from the core bundle. 

Ember vs Vue – Architecture 

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 js and Vue with each other and 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 stand for:

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

View: View components function as the Ember template, which uses a templating language like Handlebars. This structure allows Ember to easily inject data into the view part of an application dynamically.

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

The newer version of Ember follows the architecture of component-service. In some cases, it also provides asynchronous functioning and handles multiple processes simultaneously. 

What kind of architecture does Vue support?

Vue focuses on following the ViewModel approach and undertakes the pattern on MVVM, especially in the cases of developing a large-scale application. Both View and Model parts  are connected in a two-way binding approach. Here’s what M, V, VM stands for in this framework:

Model: Functions similar to the Model object of JavaScript. Once the data object enters this part, the data instance is transformed into reactive elements for creating appropriate storage layers discreetly. 

View: Actual management of DOM instances takes place in the View part of Vue. It uses DOM-based templating to successfully create root elements and correspond with the required DOM components. 

ViewModel: Handles the synching necessity between the Model and View parts of the code. This object is the primary part where developer interactions with the code take place. 

The architecture of Vue and its DOM structures are abstracted into two parts: Filters and Directives. Unlike most technologies, Vue is not a full-blown framework, hence considering that it follows a View layer pattern, the handling of application development is made flexible and simple. 

Testing – Ember vs Vue 

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 js and Vue stands out when compared with testing. 

How is the testing environment for Ember js?

Being able to ensure an application is bug-free right from the development stage is one of the beneficial aspects of Ember. It allows developers to write tests that can help quick and automatic refactoring code faster and easier. In other words, Ember does not require manual testing. Some of the tools used 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 easy is it to test Vuejs apps? 

Vue is still a rising star, and its testing abilities are straightforward yet efficient. It does not offer over-the-top luxurious tools and also does not undermine the testing capacity of its code. Unit testing of Vue is significantly close to other frameworks and typically uses Jest, Mocha, or Chai. Some of the libraries officially recommended by Vue are Vue testing Library and Vue Test Utils. They provide access to the application and user-specific APIs, making refactoring and code debugging a breeze. Faster feedback loops are possible to achieve as this framework allows CI/CD and provides hot reloading features.

Ember vs Vue – Scalability

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

Is Ember scalable? 

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

Is Vue js scalable? 

Since Vue is a lightweight framework, it is often preferred for developing small-time applications despite its flexible tools. It might be hard to believe that Vue can offer scalability to some extent. However, it’s possible by forking a Vue application and breaking it down into multiple repositories to segregate the application for convenient scaling. Since the architecture is a little dynamic, scalability is achieved using web packs and Mixin elements offered by Vue to override the code extending limitations. 

Development Complexity – Ember vs Vue 

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

Is Ember js suitable for building complex apps?

Ember is a server-side rendering focused framework that provides the necessary tools, plugins, external dependencies required to build a complex or an advanced application feasibly. 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 components structurally is something that Ember might lack today. 

Is Vue js suitable for building complex apps?

When it comes to developing complicated applications, it might be harder, and here is where the coding gets serious. Building complicated applications requires a code that can interlink different underlying components and Vue makes it harder to standardize the order of components.  But, with the help of Vuex, developing complex apps can be easily made possible without even having to write any spaghetti code. Vuex is a state management library of Vue which is specifically tuned for reducing complication by leveraging the reactivity power of Vue. 

Security Aspects– Ember vs Vue

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 are protected against attacks such as content-security attacks and cross-site scripting. Unlike most frameworks, Ember has strict security policies that help the handlebars of an application to automatically prevent attacks like XSS. 

How security is handled in Vue? 

Creator of Vue, Evan himself once stated, “built-in sanitizer would add extra bundle weight for a rare use case”. Hence, automatic protection of Vue codes against attacks like XSS or other vulnerability attacks is not possible. But with the help of external libraries or sanitizing the HTML code, there is a fighting chance against security issues. Additionally, Vue automatically injects necessary executable HTML, URL, JS codes to keep the application safe before and after rendering. 

Ember vs Vue – User Experience

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 ability of delivering the best User-experience

Building a rich UI interface is another advantage of using Ember. The community often proves that this framework is possibly even meant for designers. In other frameworks, page refresh time associated with DOM depends on which design is created and adjusted for an application. But, since Ember easily creates countless design models, the knowledge on UX focuses on updating the a page, which gives more room for creating intuitive and creative UI. Ember documents provide valuable suggestions on ways to improve the user experience productively. 

Vue’s way of delivering the best User-experience

For developing an interactive and eye-catchy UI, Vue might be an ideal choice considering the tech stack it offers. Virtual DOM ensures that changes made within the application do not directly reflect visually, which provides more scope and room for UI design experimentation. The data binding nature of this framework allows developers to easily set HTML attributes and values that can be modified anytime without influencing the existing code using a binding feature called v-bind.  Templates, animations, and transitions can be customized with material components and UI tools like Cron generator, Chakra-ui-Vue, etc. 

Ember vs Vue – Rapid development

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 Vue offer rapid development or not. 

Does ember js contribute to rapid development?

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

Does Vue js contribute to rapid development?

Building creative applications is tremendous but building them quickly is even better. Given the lightweight nature and rendering feature of Vue, developing apps at a fast pace is achievable. However, by using add-on tools like Bit, StoryBook, Vue dev-tools, and web packs like Vue loader, Single-File Components (SFCs) can be easily created. This makes the workflow faster and provides opportunities for rapid development. 

Ember vs Vue – Application size comparison

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 js and Vue in terms of application size. 

What is Ember’s application-size?

Ember is a bulky framework. To build a large-scale application or a complicated enterprise app, it 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. 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 with 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 is Vue’s application-size?

As stated earlier, Vue is a lightweight framework. This indicates that the application size might not be as heavy compared to other frameworks. A simple Vue application has a size of between 50kB and 100kB, which is not a lot. Vue CLI might make the application size appear large when it loads the code for the first time, but upon implementing lazy loading components, codes are broken into smaller pieces to improve the load time. Tools like NuxtJS, Vuex, Bit, and Vue-router remove the need for writing code from scratch. In fact, it predicts and eliminates unnecessary functions, codes with effective state management. 

Ember vs Vue – Code maintainability

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 case of Ember js and Vue.

How Ember js helps to maintain code in apps?

Ember’s coding practices make for  a much better choice when it comes to code maintenance. The components within an Ember application might be disorganized, but it still attempts 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 this, Ember spreads its inner component dependency field all over the application code. So, when it comes to the initial implementation or keeping track of maintenance, the job of code maintenance might look like a train wreck. 

How Vue js helps to maintain code in apps?

Vue is ever-growing, and it is not easy to predict how good it is going to be in the future. Will they resolve their community language issues and support limitations? Probably, but as of today, Vue is rising in pace against most frameworks that have existed for a long time. This might indicate that there is a good chance that maintaining Vue applications is not that hard. Since it lacks good support, creating conventional coding practices helps overcome limitations and obstacles. Some of the reports from Stackoverflow and Github may even indicate that Vue is future-proof considering its effortless integration abilities and code grafting continuity onto existing DOM and HTML mark-up with zero prerequisites. 

Learning curve for Ember vs Vue

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 js and Vue fare against each other in terms of the learning curve.

How easy is it to learn Ember? 

The major drawback of Ember is its steep learning curve. 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, it is challenging to learn at the initial stages. Although Ember’s documentation is adequate, this is not to say its functionalities are easy to grasp for beginners. 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 easy is it to learn Vue? 

Out of all the JavaScript frameworks, Vue is the easiest to learn and understand. It is said that it can be learned within a few hours or in less than a week. A basic understanding of how ES6 functions and fundamental skills in JavaScript programming is all that is needed. Documentation of Vue is understandable though it might not be as rich as other frameworks. The community language issue does not make it any easier for learning or sharing repositories with the community, but the official documents are more than enough for a novice to get jump-started with learning Vue and developing web apps. 

Ember vs Vue – Hiring developers

How convenient is it to hire Ember developers?

The developer experience and understandability of Ember is vital while hiring developers. The framework by itself appears 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 one expert Ember developer, it’s not 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 Vue developers?

Vue is easy to learn, but when it comes to understanding the depth of Vue concepts, the availability of developers experienced with Vue are far less. This framework abstracts the inner code complexity with its simple architecture and flexibility in features. Thus, you need a team of at least three for a small project and a group of five or more with at least one or two experienced developers for a large scale application development. Companies that provide team extension as opposed to hiring freelancers is a cost-effective way to hire Vue developers. 

Both Ember and Vue have their own sets of strengths and limitations. If you are still in a dilemma of choosing which is best for your project, the following points might help: 

Choose Ember if you want to: 

• Build complex application functionalities with Simple APIs. 
• Save development time and cost by avoiding code re-computation. 
• Write modular codes with straightforward functionalities. 
• Develop stable applications with old as well as the latest features. 
• Read and understand pre-coded app templates easily. 
• Build a refined control system for your app with every new update. 

Choose Vue if you want to: 

• Build an application prototype with advanced skills. 
• Develop and publish MVP at the earliest. 
• Integrate multiple server-rendered apps with your SPA.
• Create significant interactive elements and animations. 
• Avail better flexibility with modular solutions. 
• Build small-sized applications with significant capabilities.