React vs Svelte- A Comprehensive Comparison Between Javascript Libraries

JavaScript frameworks have become indispensable tools, enhancing the efficiency and productivity of developers in web development. As technology progresses, new frameworks emerge, offering improved simplicity, complexity, and functionality.

One such longstanding favorite is React, renowned for its virtual DOM and component-based architecture. On the flip side, Svelte takes a distinctive approach, moving much of the resource-intensive work from runtime to build time.

Now, faced with the React vs. Svelte dilemma, you’re standing at a crossroads that demands a thoughtful decision. Making the right choice can be a complex process, given the distinct strengths and trade-offs each framework brings to the table.

In this exploration, we dive into React and Svelte’s merits, drawbacks, and coding experiences, enabling you to make a well-informed choice for your upcoming web development endeavors.

React.js is an open-source Javascript library that lets you build web apps with rich user interfaces. It offers flexibility to create reusable custom components that accelerate the development process. What’s more, its ability to allow quick rendering of a web page makes it more search-engine friendly. All in all, if you are looking for a library that enables you to build light-weight and complex business applications, React.js is your best bet.  

Here are some market usage statistics for React js:

• In 2023, the survey of StackOverflow revealed that React is preferred by approximately 41% of developers.
• The framework has over 212k Github stars along with the continuously progressive community.

Use cases of React js:

• Web apps (React.js)
• Video streaming platforms
• Media sites
• Software-as-a-Service tools
• Mobile apps (React Native)
• Desktop apps (React + Electron.js)
• Progressive web apps (React + Ionic)
• JAMstack sites (Gatsby.js)

Popular apps built with React:

• PayPal improved their navigational workflows, bookmarks, and initial rendering of their payment gateway application.
• BBC built a mobile-first page with a super-fast user interface that was accessible across all the devices.
• Facebook makes the most out of its revolutionary invention, for it’s supported by more than 20,000 React.js components.
• Netflix fixed performance issues and minimized processing times for a blazing startup speed and seamless user experience.
• Twitter revamped their front-end architecture and came up with the progressive web app version. It uses this framework to update content, improve user experience, and create a browser-based UI.
  

Svelte is a Javascript web framework that compiles and converts UI components into a highly efficient imperative code that directly updates the DOM. What gives it an edge is that it’s unlike other frontend frameworks that execute virtual DOM diffing. With this tool, you can build intuitive user interfaces with excellent performance characteristics. Here are some Market usage statistics for Svelte:Svelte is a breeding ground for approximately 29,752 live websites, among which 62 websites are in the top 10K, 1113 in the top 1M, and 283 websites in the top 100K websites on the internet.

Use cases of Svelte:

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

Popular apps built with Svelte:

• TeamSpeak, with its extensive features and free tools, redesigned and re-engineered its user interface to enhance voice interface for customers.
• Houses of World built a highly-responsive and interactive interface for its unique project that lets users find their dream home worldwide.
• Doka by PQINA, built for developers to scale images, crop overlays, add photo filters, and enforce aspect ratio, is a user-friendly Javascript image editor that facilitates image integration to their projects.
• Tableplop is a browser-based online virtual tabletop to interact with players through games like track initiative or rolling a dice. The application’s frontend is built with Svelte.

Looking for more case studies? Check out madewithsvelte for some more examples.

Let’s compare React and Svelte to analyze their advantages and limitations.

• Speeds up the development process
• Composable and declarative
• SEO friendly
• Active community and ecosystem
• Guarantees a stable code
• Easy to understand and learn

• Boilerplate code
• Large bundle sizes
• Lack of comprehensive documentation
• Compatibility challenges
• Overwhelming toolchain configurations
• Lack of consistent coding patterns

• Reduced code requirements
• Easy to generate reactive variables
• No virtual DOM
• JavaScript is used for scoped styling instead of CSS
• Lightweight state management system
• Compiled Svelte apps are framework-free

• Smaller open-source ecosystem
• Steep learning curve
• Lack of suitable development tools
• Absence of IDE support
• A much smaller developer community

React and Svelte are prominent players in web development, offering distinct UI-building approaches.

React uses virtual DOM and runtime JSX, while Svelte innovates with a compile-time framework for optimized components, ensuring top-tier performance and a user-friendly learning curve.

Here’s a short comparison of Svelte vs React:

While performance should not be a killer factor for small projects, it becomes imperative when building complex and large projects. Here, we will compare the Svelte vs. React performance benchmark based on various parameters.

React’s component-based architecture contributes to software applications’ speed, usability, lightweightness, and functionality, especially single-page apps. This framework allows you to build reusable components that reduce code clutter and brings efficiency and consistency to your development lifecycle.

In addition to this, DOM manipulation plays a vital role in dramatically decreasing the page-load time, resulting in a seamless user experience.

React employs well-optimized coding practices to boost app performance. For example, developers use DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) to minimize coding errors and enhance their productivity.

Svelte is a well-optimized framework that offers flexibility to produce high-quality code during the compile time. This minimizes the runtime overhead, leading to faster loading and interface navigation.

What’s more, you no longer have to worry about the complexities surrounding Virtual DOM overhead and concurrent mode to deliver powerful and sophisticated applications.

When choosing a framework, choosing flexibility and avoiding strict architecture and guidelines enforcement is crucial. Treating a framework as a guide, not methods and standards, is always recommended. That said, let’s juxtapose React and Svelte with each other and check whether they are flexible regarding architecture.

React contributes to the view layer of web applications to display information. It comprises components that render the underlying user interface as the data changes. This constant interaction between a user’s actions and the state of components makes for a solid internal React.js architecture.

Since Svelte is a newfound technology, there’s little to no information about an application’s architectural aspects. However, there’s no denying that this framework is excellently architected to interpret user inputs faster. It works as a compiler that uses the existing Javascript to render the page. This process makes it a winner in offering the best startup performance for web applications.

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 React and Svelte stand out when compared with testing. 

React.js offers test runners to facilitate the development process. For example, tools such as Jest and Mocha practice a standard pattern of executing test suites. This way, testers can identify problems in real browser environments, unnecessary functions, and spot expensive manipulation of functions. It reduces the time-to-market, speeds up the deployment of apps, and gives push to a more productive environment.

If you’re inclined to the “lean web” idea, Svelte is for you! This framework is all about how users feel and interact with your web application. Unlike other front-end frameworks, it offers small size libraries and less complicated computations that further enables you to write testable code. What’s more, it provides a lightweight solution – Svelte testing library – to encourage developers to conduct unit testing.

React.js lends support from external server-side rendering architecture such as Redux and Flux, along with SSR frameworks like Next.js. Its code management capabilities make building complex yet interactive single-page applications easier, giving it an edge over other technologies.

Svelte is not yet at the stage of building complex web apps. It builds a cybernetically enhanced app. Other frameworks might have a record dealing with input-blocking events, while Svelte hasn’t proved proficient in a particular domain.

User experience is crucial in choosing the proper 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.

React allows you to build a user-friendly, ultra-fast application, giving it an edge over other frameworks. Its rendering capabilities boost web pages’ loading speed, further translating into a smooth user experience. Furthermore, the community and Facebook actively participate in rolling out updates that focus on its functionality and inclusion of business logic.

Svelte allows you to build lightweight applications that accelerate the page speed and instantly display content. It also removes the middle-stage loading of virtual structure/DOM to support modern, component-based user interface design. It makes the framework more likely to give a better user experience and rapid response time.

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 React and Svelte offer rapid development or not. 

React has gained its reputation as the fastest framework as it facilitates the development of fundamental apps and features. If you have a team with a fair understanding of Javascript fundamentals, the router system, and configuration caveats, you’re sure to ship your application productively and speedily. In fact, you are more likely to get good results with short-terms goals. 

Svelte has an excellent data structure to design functional and database-driven apps. It allows developers to develop more advanced features and separate the design HTML markup and application structure. This clear separation of front-end control and functioning and an orientation towards organized data structure make it a rapid front-end developer.

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 React and Svelte in terms of application size. 

React is just a library and not a fully featured frontend framework. So, if you’d see from that perspective, it should make smaller applications than those frameworks, but the React’s app sizes are bigger comparatively. However, the latest React versions have minified overall bundle size by reducing the app size by 30 percent to the previous version.

Svelte creates small-sized applications, which makes it 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 case of React and Svelte.

React has a component-based architecture focuses on building UI components, customizing user interface, and optimally using logic to build meaningful functionalities. It enables you to develop functional and individual code snippets, which can be reused in other applications and different modules.

This application break-down increases efficiency that ultimately reflects on your team’s productivity. What’s more, you no longer have to worry about orienting a new developer in your project since React supports organized components and a coding pattern that makes the code more understandable. 

Applications built with Svelte are made up of components. It has a readable structure to define different app components. For example, a web application has multiple small parts such as buttons, text boxes, forms, etc. It makes all the pieces work together, giving users a consistent user experience and developers a readable format to maintain the code.

The learning curve aids organizations in gauging developers’ proficiency time with a framework. This is crucial for framework selection, as it predicts if developers need training or practice time before using it.

Let’s compare React and Svelte’s learning curves.

Learning React js can be challenging, especially for developers new to front-end development. It demands a strong grasp of JavaScript and proficiency in intricate state management. However, once developers become acquainted with React, they can rapidly and effectively construct sophisticated user interfaces (UIs).

Svelte boasts a gentle learning curve. Its template language is designed for easy comprehension, enabling developers to grasp the framework’s essentials swiftly. Additionally, Svelte offers a concise API, resulting in fewer fundamental concepts to master. This streamlined approach accelerates the learning process.

Hiring React developers is easier than ever as Javascript experts are more likely to be interested in building web applications. Although the average cost of hiring a React developer is $81 per hour, it can go up to $100 based on the skills, experience and sometimes geography.

All that a Svelte developer requires is a deep understanding of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Ergo, recruiting them should not be a daunting task. The average hourly cost of hiring Svelte developers is between $25 and $45, depending on geography, skillsets, and experience level.

React offers essential tools and libraries such as React Router for routing, Redux for state management, built-in Context API for state management, and UI libraries like Material UI and React Bootstrap.

There are abstraction libraries tailored for React within popular libraries. For specialized use cases like server-side rendering or static site generation, React-based frameworks like Next.js and Gatsby are available.

Svelte offers a range of specialized tools and libraries tailored to specific needs. For instance, if you need routing functionality, you can use SvelteNavigator.

Svelte also provides an intuitive built-in state management system that is relatively straightforward to use immediately.

Additionally, for tasks like server-side rendering and hot reloading, SvelteKit is available, making it a preferred option among developers embarking on extensive, long-term projects.

React and Svelte are great frameworks for creating user interfaces, each with strengths and weaknesses. Depending on your needs, you can choose the one that suits you best.

Choose React JS when:

• You aim to make the most of reusing code throughout the development process
• You’re looking to create a scalable user interface and have access to experienced JavaScript developers

Choose Svelte when:

• You’re creating websites for personal use
• You’re building web apps for areas with limited internet connectivity

For expert guidance in selecting the right framework, contact Simform today. Our team can evaluate your project needs and suggest the best-fit solution, whether it’s React for established projects or Svelte for faster, simpler, high-performance apps.