Introduction
I have always felt a little jealous about back-end development if you talk from a front-end perspective. Not so long ago developers did not have to deal with so many devices like they have to do today. Not to say that users have became more and more demanding. A big part of humanity is used to handle all kind of things from their smartphones, computers, etc. And this represents a big challenge for developers. Manage banking operations, ask for food delivery, watch your favorite tv shows… I am sure that you take into a lot of value that all these applications offer a great user experience.
It is our job as developers to take into account an infinite number of factors to build solutions that scale in a proper way while still offering a fluid experience. And it is difficult. Very difficult.
Focusing on the front-end part of these solutions, we have different frameworks/libraries to help us. Let’s talk about their state in 2025.
Angular
Nineteen. That is the number of the major versions that the Angular Team has released. A long journey until today.
This framework has had always a heavy weight on its shoulders since the appearance of AngularJS, first version that has nothing to do with all the following that came after.
Angular v17 was named by its dev team as Angular Renaissance. It has to mean something. They have been adding very useful features to increase the dev experience and I have to admit that they caught my attention.
The adding of Angular Signals, the zoneless change detection, control flow on templates, the new resource API, etc. Everything is going in the same direction: offer new tools that can help developers to handle different complex aspects the simplest way they can.
This year looks very promising. The Angular team is working on adding signals to forms, selectorless components, and maybe one of the most interested ones in my opinion: replace Karma as testing tool. I have to admit that maybe I am not the biggest fan of this tool. I think there had been another ones more prepared for testing in the market for a long time, and this could be a great time to change that. They have been working with Web Test Runner, Jest and Vitest so we can only expect good things to happen.
React
Nineteen. Same number as Angular versions. Coincidence? I leave it in your roof. React started as a tool for building component libraries in a friendly way having a good understanding of JavaScript. But this has been changing during all this years. The complexity of modern apps has increased and developers need to handle more complex tasks.
Not long ago, React changed its documentation and started to recommend the use of Next.js, meta-framework created by Vercel. It helps us to use SSR (Server-Side Rendering), structure our pages by folders, use layouts on a simplest way, etc. On the other hand, it has become more complex on every version released and developers have started to claim that this is far from the original intention that React had at the beginning.
In my opinion, React has lost a little its way. As a developer, we have a lot of tools based on the library for different purposes that may seem a little overwhelming. And the number has been increasing year by year. « If you want SSR, go for Next.js or Remix, if you want a simple app, Vite with React, if you want a blog, Gatsby », etc. And different options like React Start that seems quite promising keep appearing on scene, offering similar advantages than the rest.
It seems a little complicated to choose the right one to build a project for someone not familiar with the library. Maybe other tools like Angular or Vue offer a more unique solution to achieve all of this. I am not saying that this is necessarily bad, but having to learn a new framework based on the same technology every year seems unnecessary. I know that something similar happens inside every framework’s ecosystem, but we start from the same base in those cases.
On the other hand, precisely this freedom to choose between different tools has made React one of the most flexible libraries that we have in our hands to build any kind of project.
Vue
I have liked Vue since I had the chance to use it. I think it sets a middle point between Angular and React. Not so difficult to learn as the first and not so simple as the second.
Vue has great things like composables to reuse logic across your application, computed properties to handle reactivity easily, powerful directives, a solid Composition API, Pinia as a great help to handle state, etc.
It can even be more boosted with a meta-framework like Nuxt, something similar to Next.js for React. Imagine all the Vue’s power, with SSR, routes handled as folders, native middlewares, autoimports, and a dedicated server technology with Nitro. You can build an entire app (frontend and backend) with Nuxt if you want. Maybe it is not the recommended way for a production-grade solution, but can be welcome to mock data and other similar purposes.
Other Kids On The Block
Angular, React and Vue are by far the most used front-end technologies for building applications. As we have seen, they can even handle back-end tasks to build a complete solution, but I would not recommend this way for a business purpose.
But there are more actors in this movie, maybe not as famous as the other ones, but with enough potential to become new kings in the future.
Svelte
If you know any developer that has had the chance to work with Svelte, they will have probably want to use it again in future projects. This is the feeling that I get from any colleague I talk about this tool. Maybe at this moment its use is not very extended, but features like these can change the game in the future: labeled statements, automatic component exports, unused CSS checks, clear nomenclature, global state management by default, #await blocks, etc. Lots of things that make developer’s experience nicer than other frameworks. And they have its own meta-framework: Sveltekit, something similar to Next.js or Nuxt.
Astro
One of the big discoveries talking from a front-end perspective. It is meant to be focused on building content-driven websites as its website claims. It is focused on offering the chance of rendering sites on the server side leaving away all the unused code, loading data from practically any source.
Its flexibility is quite remarkable. Are you a React, Preact, Vue, SolidJS, Alpine.js or Svelte developer? No problem. You can use components of this libraries simply importing them.
Not to say, the power of Astro Islands to improve performance, web vitals and SEO only executing parts of the code when it is necessary.
I will give it a try this year to test its capabilities.
What To Learn
All this tools may seem a little too much if you are someone who wants to start learning front-end development, so I would focus on getting a solid base with HTML, CSS and JavaScript before learning how to use them. Give JavaScript more power with the use of TypeScript, superset that boosts even more the language that web browsers understand.
When the moment comes and you want to learn some of these tools, you can choose two paths: the one with a less steep learning curve and the opposite. I personally started with Angular long time ago and it has helped me set lots of good practices that I apply to others. If you want to set a more friendly starting point, I would go with React. It lets you use JavaScript/TypeScript directly in your code and makes building things from the beginning easier.
Another point that may seem not so important at the beginning is the creators and community behind every tool. Angular is supported by Google. They joined forces with Wiz, internal framework to build front-end apps used by YouTube, so it shows the importance they want to give to their framework. You can say that its community is quite big. On the other hand, Vue was created by Evan You, former worker at Google who wanted to solve things differently than Angular did based on his experience. With React we have so many options to choose. Maybe too many. Which one is the best? You decide. The library was created by Meta, but they have been recently working with Vercel’s team to make Next.js the default choice to build full-stack solutions. Remix, another great tool for making use of SSR, is supported by Shopify, and they are working hard to beat Next.js. Apps like ChatGPT migrated from Next.js to Remix some months ago. TanStack is another group behind great tools like TanStack Query, TanStack Start, TanStack Router, etc. They are doing an amazing job helping developers in things like dealing with API resources. It depends on how you see this variety of React tools. They don’t put things easy at the beginning to choose a solid set to create apps. Which library do I choose to handle routing? Handle state management? Do testing? Handle HTTP requests?
Conclusion
I would try at least to get familiar with two frameworks/libraries to see how they handle different aspects. This would make easier learning any other one. Today we have three main actors, but nobody knows which one will be the winner in the future, so get ready.
