The main frameworks

Every browser runs the same three languages: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Every framework, however it's written, ends up as those three. Above that base, four frameworks build the interface from components: React, Angular, Vue and Svelte. They do the same core job, which the lesson Components and state showed. They differ in who makes them, how much they include, and how many people use them.

On top of three of them sit frameworks that handle the whole site: an address for each page, and pages made in advance or on a server. Next.js is built on React, Nuxt on Vue, and SvelteKit on Svelte. Angular includes its own way of making pages on a server. Astro stands apart: it's made for content sites, and its interactive pieces can be written with any of the four.

These are the names you'll meet in quotes, job offers and the plans that AI agents propose. The diagram places each one.

React was created at Meta, the company behind Facebook, and first released in 2013. Meta rebuilt Facebook.com with it, as its engineering blog described in 2020. Since February 2026, React no longer belongs to Meta: it's owned by the React Foundation, hosted by the Linux Foundation, whose founding members include Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Vercel.

React builds only the interface. For everything else (the addresses of the pages, fetching data, forms), the team chooses among many ready-made libraries, or uses a framework built on React, such as Next.js. That gives freedom, but two React projects can be organised very differently, so a new developer has more to learn about each one.

It's the most used of the frameworks. In the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026, about 42% of the developers who answered had used it in the past year. In France, Welcome to the Jungle builds its design system with it, and Next.js's own showcase lists sites such as Nike, OpenAI and Netflix Jobs. React Native applies the same ideas to mobile apps for iPhone and Android, so a React team can also build those.

Angular is made by a team at Google. Its first version, Angular 2, came out in 2016 as a complete rewrite of an older framework, AngularJS, released in 2010. Despite the names, they're two different frameworks, and moving from one to the other means rewriting.

Angular comes complete. Pages and addresses, forms, communication with the server and tests are all included, and it uses TypeScript by default. There's one way of doing each thing, so Angular projects look alike, and developers in large teams can move from one project to another. Google says it builds large products on it, from Google Fonts to Google Cloud. In France, Lucca, a company that makes HR software, publishes the Angular components it builds its products with.

AngularJS shows what the end of support means: it stopped receiving any fixes in January 2022, so sites still built on it get no security fixes. Angular itself publishes its calendar on its website. Since version 22, in June 2026, it releases one major version a year and supports each one for 24 months.

Vue was created by Evan You in 2014, as a personal side project. It's an independent project, paid for by sponsors since 2016, with no large company behind it. Its templates stay close to plain HTML, which makes it easy to start with, and a team can add it to an existing site one piece at a time. GitLab builds its interface with it, and the official showcase of Nuxt, the framework built on Vue, lists French sites such as La Poste, Malt and Roland-Garros. In the Stack Overflow survey of 2026, about 17% of developers had used it.

Svelte was created by Rich Harris in 2016, and its website says it's backed by Vercel. It works differently from the other three: it's a compiler, which turns components into plain JavaScript before the site goes online, so the browser doesn't download a framework at all. Its website shows the logos of companies that use it, such as Spotify, IKEA and Decathlon. It's used less, by about 8% of developers in the 2026 survey, but they like it: in the State of JavaScript survey of 2025, 86% of the developers who had used it were satisfied. A smaller community also means fewer developers to hire and fewer ready-made components.

Next.js is built on React. Vercel, a hosting company then called ZEIT, released it in 2016. Its showcase lists sites such as Nike, OpenAI and Sonos. In the State of JavaScript survey of 2025, 59% of the developers who answered had used it, the most of any framework of this kind, but only 55% of them were satisfied.

Nuxt is built on Vue. It was created in 2016 by Sébastien Chopin, a French developer, and the company he founded to develop it, NuxtLabs, joined Vercel in July 2025. SvelteKit is built on Svelte by the Svelte team, and reached version 1.0 in 2022. Astro reached version 1.0 in 2022 too. Its showcase lists IKEA, Porsche and Michelin, and its users are the most satisfied: 94% in the same survey. The company behind it joined Cloudflare in January 2026.

So two hosting companies, Vercel and Cloudflare, now pay for several of these frameworks. All of them stay open source and run on other hosts too, but a framework's makers naturally make it easiest to run on their own hosting.

The chart shows the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026: the share of developers who used each framework in the past year, among the roughly 10,300 who answered that question. React leads with about 42%, then Next.js (21%), Vue (17%), Angular (16%) and Svelte (8%).

Other surveys ask other questions. The State of JavaScript survey of 2025, with about 13,000 answers, asked who had ever used each framework: React 85%, Vue 52%, Angular 48%, Svelte 27%. It also asked whether they were satisfied with it: Svelte 86%, Vue 84%, React 72% and Angular 48%.

A survey of developers isn't a count of websites. W3Techs, which scans millions of sites, finds in October 2026 that jQuery, an older and simpler library, runs on about 65% of all websites, and React on about 6%. Most of the web is older or simpler sites, while surveys show what developers work with today. So before quoting a figure, check what was counted: developers or websites, used once or used last year.

Use these questions when a quote, a job description or an agent's plan names a framework.

Ask who makes it and who pays for its work: a large company, a foundation, sponsors or a hosting company. Ask whether the people who will maintain the site already know it. That often matters more than which framework is "best". Ask whether the name is the framework itself or one built on top of it: "Next.js" means React too, plus a way of making pages, and a question about where the site will be hosted. And ask why this framework rather than a simpler tool. Popularity on its own isn't a reason: as the lesson Behaviour put it, the right tool is the simplest one that does the job.