The modern website and application interfaces are constantly changing to offer the best user experience. However, modern application interfaces demand modern development tools. These days, the business preference of the developers’ community has directed us towards two noteworthy frameworks – Bootstrap and Vue. Both of these have unique developmental approaches, and choosing one of them for your next project is obviously going to be a tough decision.
This comprehensive guide gives a detailed comparison of Bootstrap and Vue as a modern UI framework and provides various criteria you should look out for.
What is Bootstrap? – An Overview
Bootstrap, also known as Twitter Bootstrap, is an open-source front-end CSS framework used to create responsive mobile-first websites. While the front-end framework template is primarily based on CSS, there are various HTML templates available along with support from JavaScript components like jQuery. It has become the second popular UI development framework for its responsive design templates, frameworks, grids, and most importantly, multi-site compatibility.
Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton developed this framework with the idea of standardizing the use of a framework by Twitter employees. This is how the framework came to be known as Twitter Bootstrap. In 2011, the developers launched this project on GitHub for everyone’s access.
Use Cases of Bootstrap
• Microblogging applications
• Social media applications
• Video streaming applications
• E-commerce websites
• Content-based website
• Geo-location applications
• On-demand applications
• Payment applications
• Messaging service web app
• Responsive web applications
Popular Apps Built with Bootstrap
• Vogue
• Apple Maps Connect
• Lyft
• Whatsapp
What is Vue? – 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.
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
• Laravel Spark
• Behance
• Gitlab
• Adobe Portfolio
Bootstrap vs. Vue – Performance Comparison
While performance should not be a killer factor for small projects, it becomes extremely important to consider when building complex and large projects. With that being said, let’s compare Bootstrap and Vue in terms of performance.
How does Bootstrap stand out in terms of performance?
Bootstrap is known for its user-centric ease for developing websites and web applications, but when it comes to performance, one has to keep a close eye on it. Developers have often criticized the framework for its vast library and unutilized resources, leading to slower performance. But, what they miss is that it also offers extensive customization features to increase the app’s performance, irrespective of it being content-heavy.
Utilizing requirement-specific resources reduces the bulk over the website, such as using the source code rather than the entire library. Minimal and lean use of CSS and JavaScript codes minimizes the load on the downloading browser and increases efficiency while displaying. Other common workarounds would include compressing images, moving the server closer to the audience, and using a CDN for a high-performance loaded website. With the best practices, Bootstrap can have a lower fully loading time of 2.1 seconds of a page size that is 1.3 MB.
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.
Wrapping up
Bootstrap and Vue have proven to be essential and optimal frameworks for developing the frontend UI of applications within startups and establishing companies.
Check out the original article here: Bootstrap vs Vue: Which Framework Would Win the Tug of War