At one point, I had a dilemma whether to use VueJs or Livewire to provide dynamic functionalities on the front-end. I already had a good foundation on Laravel and I already coded quite a lot on the back end on a side project that I was building. I was about to build a chat system for the Laravel application. As you know, when you wanted to integrate some sort of chat functionalities, it’s inevitable that you learn JavaScript to handle ajax which loads chat messages real time without having to refresh the page.
VueJS is extremely popular while Livewire relatively new even to this point of time. In the next section, I’m going to list exactly why I was hesitant to use Livewire at first and later on explain why in spite of a lot of pros of VueJS, I decided to focus on Livewire instead.
Pros of VueJS vs Livewire
(1) Tons of Tutorials
At this point of time, VueJS had matured. Building a chat system on top Laravel for example I would say there are about 9 tutorials online using VueJS vs 1 on Livewire. YouTube is flooded with VueJS tutorial on how to build a messaging app.
(2) VueJS being more “powerful” Livewire
This is hard to prove because I never used both technologies to their full potential to say one is powerful than the other. This is goes true as well for people who say Livewire is a less powerful framework but they never actually use the framework.
(3) Job Market
No doubt it. There is huge demand for VueJS developer than Livewire at this point of time.
(4) Scalability
This is also hard to prove as number 2 until you have built a high demand app for both frameworks and measure their performances. Truth is that most of the criticism I found on reddit and Stack Overflow is that livewire send ajax request to the server more often than VueJS thereby decreasing the performance. This is not entirely true as there are ways to mitigate these frequent requests such as defer and lazy
Pros of Livewire vs VueJS
At this point of time, I already had good foundation on both framework but what I can tell you from personal experience and what 99% of other people who both framework would agree is that Livewire is by far the easier to use primarily because it use the same syntax as Laravel.
So, it seems at this point VueJs has more pros than Livewire with the latter advantage only being easy to learn.
For me with number 1 and 3 being a clear win for VueJS I would still pick Livewire simply because of its ease of use. It allows me to build application faster.
I have strong conviction with Livewire specially the support it is getting massive support from Taylor. At the end of the day, I will always buy with Laravel main philosophy which is to focus on the developer’s experience and with Livewire it’s not just easy but is also fun.