If you're considering using Svelte or React for your next project, this article will guide you through 10 key points that will help you make the right decision. Step by step, we’ll compare Svelte and React to clarify their differences and help you determine which one best fits your needs.
We chose React and Svelte to compare the widely-adopted gold standard of frontend development with an alternative that proved well in building web UIs and received positive feedback from software engineers. Plus, SVAR offers UI components for both Svelte and React, so we wanted to help you with the decision-making process.
What Are Svelte and React?
React is an open-source JS library developed and supported by Meta team and accepting contributions from a global community of web developers. It is designed for creating dynamic user interfaces with the component-based approach in its core. Its most notable features include virtual DOM, JavaScript Syntax Extension (JSX), one-direction data flow, and functional components and React hooks.
Svelte is an open-source frontend framework founded by Rich Harris, supported by full-time and part-time maintainers, and backed by Vercel. Svelte uses a compiler for processing components into highly optimized JS code — as a result users benefit from higher client-side performance. The key features include: compiled code, optimized bundle size, components reactivity, and the ability to use components as standalone packages.
If You Like The Story Short
If you don't have time for the long explanations, here is the summary of our comparison:
Use React if:
- You need a mature ecosystem with extensive third-party libraries.
- You’re building a large-scale or complex project requiring advanced state management.
- You want strong TypeScript support and robust SSR capabilities (provided by Next.js).
- Your team already has rich React experience (more developers available on the job market).
Use Svelte if:
- You prioritize performance (faster runtime, smaller bundle sizes).
- You want a simpler, easier-to-learn framework with a more intuitive syntax.
- You’re working on a small to medium-scale project without complex state management needs.
- You want to experiment with a modern, compiler-based approach.
But if you would like to explore the key factors in more details, here we go.
1. Performance
To begin with, we should admit that both Svelte and React are designed to deliver high performance in web apps, but they approach this issue in different ways. Svelte compiles components at build time into optimized JavaScript that directly updates the DOM. This eliminates runtime diffing, reducing overhead and resulting in smaller bundle sizes and faster performance.
React traditionally uses a virtual DOM to optimize rendering. It tracks UI changes in memory, compares versions, and updates only necessary parts of the real DOM, improving efficiency. With the introduction of the beta version of React Compiler, React can now automatically optimize renders and reduce unnecessary re-renders at build time, bringing some compile-time optimizations similar to Svelte’s approach.
2. Development Speed
Both Svelte and React have a component-based approach to building apps aimed at accelerating the development process. This means that you can create separate building blocks and then reuse them in different parts of the application.
When it comes to syntax, dependencies and configuration, Svelte is much more minimalistic than React and is a very good option for small-scale apps. Its simplicity can significantly speed up the designing of a project. However, React is often the better choice for large, complex applications, as it scales more effectively.
3. The Learning Curve
As for the learning curve, it is obviously steeper in React. Developers often say that you need to “think in React” to successfully use it on your project. This means that you really need to understand how it works, get used to its syntax (JSX) and the data flow model. You also have to get familiar with a number of additional tools for state management or routing, as React does not natively support this functionality.
Svelte syntax is quite simple and you can easily get the hang of it, especially if you are familiar with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Svelte components encapsulate HTML, CSS and JS, having the markup, style and logic in one place.
4. Project Scale & Complexity
If you’re planning to design a minimalistic small-scale or a medium-scale app, Svelte will be a better option. Its minimalistic nature and compile-time optimizations allow for faster development and smaller bundle sizes. For larger apps, Svelte can still be used effectively as long as the architecture doesn’t become too complex.
In case your app is a large and complex system with interactive UI and real-time updates — React will be a better choice due to its robust ecosystem and extensive number of tools and libraries for any possible case.
If SEO is important, React with Next.js provides mature and efficient SSR support. While Svelte supports SSR through SvelteKit, React’s established SSR solutions make it the better option for SEO-heavy, large-scale apps.
5. State Management
Svelte and React take distinctly different approaches to state management. Svelte 5 introduces runes ($state, $derived, $effect, etc.) that make state management even more intuitive than in previous versions. These built-in reactive primitives eliminate the need for external state management libraries in most cases, while maintaining excellent performance and developer experience.
React’s state management is more flexible but requires different tools based on the complexity of the app. For small-scale projects, the useState and useContext hooks can work well. However, for larger projects with more complex state, it’s common to rely on third-party libraries like Redux, MobX, or Zustand to manage global state more efficiently.
While React itself doesn’t provide a full-fledged state management solution out of the box (other than the Context API), the flexibility of choosing your preferred solution can be a strength for more complex applications.
6. TypeScript Support
Both Svelte and React support the use of TypeScript within their components. Its implementation in Svelte is straightforward, you just add lang=”ts” to the <script> tag and you are done.
React requires more setup. You can install TypeScript via npm or yarn, then create .tsx files for components that use JSX syntax. TypeScript integration in React isn’t as seamless as in Svelte, but it’s still a powerful tool that works well with the React ecosystem and can be fully customized.
7. Tooling and Ecosystem
React has a much larger ecosystem, with a wide variety of libraries, a large community, and extensive documentation. It’s easy to find solutions for almost any issue.
In contrast, Svelte’s ecosystem is still smaller, with fewer libraries and a smaller community. Despite this, Svelte’s performance benefits and minimalistic approach are driving its increasing popularity and the development of new tools and libraries.
8. UI Component Libraries
Both Svelte and React are frameworks for creating user interfaces. This means that you can design your custom components of any complexity using the possibilities they provide. However, the process of building UIs from scratch can be really time-consuming.
Luckily, today we have access to a wide variety of third-party UI libraries that can be easily integrated into your project. There are comprehensive UI libraries for React, like Chakra UI, MUI, Ant Design, or Mantine, so you can choose the one that suits you most.
As for Svelte, there are Flowbite Svelte, SvelteUI, Svelte Material UI, or SVAR Svelte Core Library. SVAR UI components stand out with their fast performance, responsive design, and customization capabilties.
9. Team Experience
State of JS survey shows that React is the undisputed leader in terms of the number of software engineers who use it in their everyday work. The share of React developers exceeds 80%, while that of Svelte is about 25%. The good news is that Svelte already holds the fourth position on the list of the most commonly used JS frameworks.
What does all that mean? Well, if you decide on React for your project, you should not have any difficulty gathering your development team. And here React has an advantage over Svelte.
However, for web developers Svelte learning curve is gentle, so starting using and mastering it will not take much time in most cases. Moreover, the mentioned survey shows that Svelte keeps ranking high for positive feedback, which means your team will be a little bit happier than the one that uses React :)
10. Enterprise Adoption
We have already mentioned that React is a more mature solution for web development which is widely adopted by businesses. Does that mean Svelte is a newcomer unsuitable for enterprise applications? Absolutely not!
Let’s look through the list of companies that have their apps built in React. Here we have Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, BBC, Airbnb, Tesla, Shopify, Pinterest — and this is by no means a comprehensive list. Looks really impressive.
But what about Svelte? Apple, New York Times, Cloudflare, IKEA, Spotify — the list is no less impressive. Large enterprises trust both React and Svelte when it comes to creating their business products. So, why shouldn’t we?
Conclusion
In this article we considered the key points that can determine our choice in favor of React or Svelte: performance and development speed, the learning curve and team expertise, the ecosystem and tooling, enterprise adoption and project scale.
And if you're still wondering what other differences between Svelte and React are, take a look at a recent interview with Rich Harris, a creator of Svelte, who talks about both tools and compares their approaches:
We hope all this will help you make the right decision on your way to build web apps of any scale.