The State of Vue.js 2025 report, created with the support of the Vue and Nuxt teams, shows the maturity of this popular front-end framework. Meanwhile, Vue creator Evan You says that Vapor Mode, a big optimization feature, has been delayed by compatibility issues.

Vue.js is a popular alternative to React which is enjoyed for its ease of getting started, though React still dominates. Vue.js is used by 15 percent of developers according to the latest StackOverflow survey, versus 39.5 percent for React, or by 51 percent of JavaScript developers in the last State of JavaScript survey, whereas React scores 81.1 percent.

The dominance of React is even greater according to figures shown in the survey for the number of sites built with these frameworks. React has over 52 million live sites, versus 8 million for Vue.js. 

Nevertheless, Vue.js is number two in frontend frameworks by many measures. The report includes a survey of 1,428 professionals, primarily developers or CTOs (Chief Technology Officers), and 80 percent said they will use Vue.js for a new project. In the last such survey, conducted in 2021, that figure was 74 percent.

Vue.js is part of a stack which includes the Vite build tool, also created by Evan You, and the Nuxt.js framework which is built on Vue but adds features including middleware, server-side rendering (SSR) and performance optimizations. Evan You founded a venture-capital funded company, VoidZero, last year with the intent to provide unified JavaScript (and TypeScript) tooling based on Vite.

What is next for Vue.js? There is a refactored reactivity system, said You, which will be in the forthcoming 3.6. There is also Vapor Mode, which abandons the notion of keeping a virtual DOM (document object model) in memory for fast update, in favour of updating the real DOM directly. This uses less memory, and takes advantage of modern web browsers that are optimized for fast DOM updates. You said that “Vapor Mode has been on hold for a few months, but we’re restarting its development.” It is scheduled to appear in the Vue 3.6 as an experimental feature, though we are warned that “it will not be fully feature-complete.” 

According to You, the big challenge is compatibility. “Because Vapor Mode is an entirely new runtime, trying to make the behavior consistent between Vapor Mode and other modes will be a lot of work,” he said.

Vue.js suffered from breaking changes in version 3, which still impact developers today because of the difficulty migrating from Vue.js 2. Some 25 percent of survey respondents cited migration difficulties as a challenge, the highest ranking pain point. You said this will not happen again. “Vue is a very stable framework after Vue 3,” he said. If there is a Vue 4, it will be “pretty much the same thing, but with small breaking changes,” he promised.

The same applies to Nuxt, which changed radically between v2 and v3. “If the upgrade path is painful or time-consuming, we totally lose the benefit of adopting Nuxt,” said core team members in the report. Nuxt 4, which is coming soon, should offer a comfortable upgrade experience, the team promised.

Asked about the future of the JavaScript ecosystem, You said that the “runtime wars between Node, Bun and Deno are worth watching.” However, he is betting on Node.js, because the other runtimes “end up being Node.js compatible.” 

82.4 percent of Vue.js developers in the survey use TypeScript; but its use with Vue.js is not as smooth as they would like. “Developers mentioned issues with props, reactivity, and template inference,” the report states. Speed of development in large TypeScript codebases is also cited as a challenge – perhaps the forthcoming Go-based compiler may help.

Vue.js, said Vue creator You, is the alternative for “people who don’t like certain things React does.” Though in this context, we also often hear Svelte mentioned, a framework which You acknowledges as “now a substantial player in the ecosystem.”

The full report can be found here.