React
In a Business Perspective

The report for C-level executives implementing or planning to implement React or React Native in their organizations.

Together with:

    Introduction

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    Why did we create this report?

    Finding a general knowledge about React JS & React Native is relatively easy.

    You can use:

    • Clear and precise React documentation
    • Tons of blog articles and videos
    • Open source projects
    • Online courses
    • etc.

    The bigger problem is to find an exact top-level business knowledge about it. In other words, a knowledge about:

    How using React is actually impacting my business?

    React as any other piece of software is here to efficiently build web & mobile products, but how is it actually impacting the modern world of development?

    We know the number of downloads, number of repositories or number of open source projects, but what if these numbers are just vanity metrics and a true valuable business knowledge is somewhere hidden?

    This report was made to help C-level executives decide if they should use React in their organizations or not.

    It will also help organizations understand if using React is a good idea in a longer term and if they should keep this technology in their stack for the future.

    Who should read it?

    We made it for:

    • Top-level tech leaders
    • Founders
    • Top-level Executives
    • Team Leaders
    • Senior Developers

    That cares about efficiency in building web and mobile apps.

    The truth is, each and every day technology is changing, and what seems to be a great idea one day, becomes outdated the other.

    Developers became more demanding, and it is only becoming harder to find the one that will find a common language in the team.

    This is why we spoke to people like CTOs with a need of clear understanding on how modern technology is able to fix common issues, make their work easier, and stay safe in the perspective of constant growth and rapid changes.

    There are many C-level executives that are still hesitating if React is able to keep its promises, as to make appealing calculations of pros and cons appears to be extremely hard in such a technology rush.

    There are also many top-level executives that may want to switch to React already, but still cannot find a good and convincing business reason to make the move.

    There are hundreds of founders that would like to implement modern technology, and are still searching for the perfect one.

    Also, companies working with React already will find great pieces of advice and insights from other top-level executives.

    At the end, there are people that want, but are not sure how, or where to start without carrying a huge cost.

    This report is for all of you.

    This was delivered by Pagepro – a React Dev Shop that is consulting, training teams, and building products for startups and and Digital Agencies.
    Together with React Digest Newsletter and Software Development Association Poland.

    Read the report later, in a PDF version!

    Pagepro is the sole administrator of the data provided to us by third parties. By downloading our resources or sending us inquiries, you grant us permission to send you further correspondence, such as our company newsletter, event notifications, or updates on the services we provide. You may unsubscribe from our messaging or change the preferences of what you receive from us at any time. Read our Privacy Policy to learn more about the ways we protect and secure your personal information.

    Market Context

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    In 2020 most tech teams starting a new project are choosing one of three most popular solutions (React, Angular and Vue) for building their products.

    Let’s start with checking if React is worth our interest by investigating some key market metrics.

    React VS Competition:

    2 Angular (30.7%)
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    React (33%)
    3 Vue (3.5%)

    Which JavaScript frameworks are regularly used?

    At the beginning of 2019, JetBrains polled almost 7,000 developers to identify the State of Developer Ecosystem. Let’s check how React was seen by the developers.

    React VS Competition:

    2 Vue (39%)
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    React (74% with React Native) (54%)
    3 Angular (14%)

    The need of React Developers

    Let’s take a look at the industry demand for specific developers by scanning Indeed job portal in different main development centers in Europe.

    London, UK

    Paris, France

    Berlin, Germany

    React VS Competition:

    2 Angular (1973)
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    React (3036)
    3 Vue (834)

    Developers’ satisfaction of using React

    In the last year, Stack Overflow survey developers responded that React is the most loved web framework used in 2019.

    React VS Competition:

    2 Vue (73,6%)
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    React (75,5%)
    3 Angular (57,6%)

    New coming React developers on the market

    React is the framework most developers want to learn 32% of Hackerrank HackerRank Developer Skills Survey says it’s the framework they’re learning next.

    That means we can expect more React developers on the market to fulfill the demand gap.

    Which frameworks do you plan on learning next?

    React VS Competition:

    2 Angular (27,6%)
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    React (32,3%)
    3 Vue (23,6%)

    Market Context Key Takeaways

    • React is the most popular web & mobile development tool on the market.
    • Developers like to work with React, companies are demanding React developers.
    • Vue is getting traction, but mostly for developer’s non commercial projects. Companies are not still convinced and not actively hiring people knowing Vue.
    • Angular has almost as great adoption rate as React, companies prefer to hire Angular developers than Vue, unfortunately, Angular developers are the less satisfied developers of their technology.

    About the Research

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    The research was made to help you uncover the advantages of using React from a business perspective.

    We asked about 500 CTOs from:

    • UK
    • France
    • Germany
    • Australia
    • Netherlands

    to share their experiences with React and React Native.

    Our survey contained closed and open-ended questions that were strictly related with business topics around software development.

    After receiving the results we have also asked industry experts to share their thoughts and comments.

    Now, here we are! Super excited to share it all with you!

    Survey Results

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    Let’s take a look at how our respondents answered key business-oriented questions. Under the answers, we also have some comments from industry experts.

    Q1

    Is React moving in the right direction?

    Why do you think React is moving in the right direction?

    I agree that React is moving in the right direction. It has already helped transform many businesses, and has been adopted as the front-end technology of choice by many large tech companies such as Netflix.

    React components are easier to extend and maintain. These components help empower front-end development teams to increase productivity and save businesses time and money. In addition, React’s reusable nature suits multivariate testing, and helps teams deliver better user experiences which have a positive knock-on effect to goal conversion rates.

    Profile picture of author Tim Baker
    Tim Baker
    Managing Director
    Stamford Digital

    React has been so modern and seems to have a good finger on the pulse of where modern web development is going.

    Using and developing their context API to take away some of the complexity that newer developers may experience while using something like Redux, and they keep updating.

    That’s why I think React is moving in the right direction. It seems to be taking the strengths and weaknesses of all types of programs, whether they are new or old, and coming up with solutions fairly often updating the library to match that.

    In terms of React and Gatsby, I think that it’s getting easier to create static sites versus things like WordPress. I’m seeing a lot of things like React Library and a really good-looking React templates come online so people are able to get a really nice website faster instead of having it totally coded from the beginning.

    Profile picture of author Brandon Stiles
    Brandon Stiles
    Founder
    Fourloop.ai
    Q2

    For what types of projects are you mainly using React?

    In what kind of projects do you think React is the best tool to use and why?

    I personally believe that React fits for most of the general use cases. Our respondents are usually using React in business (B2C and B2B projects), but this is just the preference of our respondents, not the whole market. Our developers are applying it in their daily routine and I can see people using it more and more in their everyday life, as React can be easily used to speed up and improve many areas that we cope with.

    In general, the more we use web and mobile, the more we can use React to improve what we do.

    Profile picture of author Mariusz Marcak
    Mariusz Marcak
    Co-Founder
    JS Minds

    I would personally use react for all these cases, however the only thing i can think of for not using it in b2b is because react leaves more decisions up to you and is less opinionated than say Angular. Angular is probably better for enterprise because its very opinionated and comes with everything.

    Less decisions to make and more documented practices.

    Profile picture of author Harris Robin Kalash
    Harris Robin Kalash
    Co-Founder & CTO
    Uplet
    Q3

    Which of the following best describes the type of environment you work in?

    Why React can be a good tool to use for Startups?

    Doppel was the first app I ever built. I had built some websites & web apps before, but never touched native code. So it was incredible to be able to start building components, buttons, screens, etc. right off the bat using just Javascript and React. With React Native, I could focus on building out features and native integrations, rather than spending my time figuring when a component was going to render, or what styling rules to apply.

    Oh and the best part is, with just one codebase for both the iOS and Android platforms, the build cycle is 2 times quicker than if I had to learn Swift and Kotlin.

    Profile picture of author Samuel Yang
    Samuel Yang
    Founder
    Doppel

    As you will see in other answers, React allows you to speed up the development, faster time to market, and cut development costs. These are the main objectives of startups, right after a product-market fit. An incredibly huge network of React contributors work constantly on creating more and more possibilities to make React the ultimate answer in web development and make other developers life easier. Besides that, great thing about React is that you can reuse components you have already built, anywhere in your project, which makes the development process even easier and faster. Mind that you can find many great “ready-to-use” solutions, waiting to be applied into your project, absolutely free of charge.

    Profile picture of author Chris Lojniewski
    Chris Lojniewski
    CEO
    Pagepro
    Q4

    Is React boosting team productivity and facilitates further maintenance?

    What makes React boost the productivity of your team?

    React is boosting the productivity of my team in two ways :
    – Firstly, it’s an awesomely well designed and maintained tool, making it very reliable and quickly improving / adapting to new web development patterns and needs
    – Secondly, the size of its community makes it a great central library for frontend development approach which many others add-ons / component libraries of higher grade are available and particularly well maintained too. Of course, it also makes hiring React devs easier, as 1 out of 4 hirings in web dev now requires being skilled with react.

    Profile picture of author David Panart
    David Panart
    Founder
    I Will Code It
    Q5

    Is React making it faster to onboard new developers  to the project compared with other stacks?

    Q6

    What is the most important factor when deciding on a mobile development approach?

    What are your common problems when developing cross-platform apps?

    The context to this question is that there is no such thing as native cross platform development, iOS uses a different language from Android. Over the years two main strategies have developed to write a single code base shared between both platforms.

    First is hybrid app development, where a website is wrapped in a webview. Hybrid app development has a bad reputation for being slow and having poor connectivity to the device’s hardware.

    Second is where common elements for each platform are abstracted by another language. Examples include React Native and Flutter. This is the most popular way to develop a performant app in short time scales without a huge budget.

    At App Sapiens we trust React Native; the community is vast and it has been used in production by hundreds of apps over the years.

    React Native does, however, have its difficulties. If you have no experience with native app development then you will have to learn the quirks of both XCode and Android Studio in order to build and debug your apps.

    Fortunately there has been a recent development to ease this complexity: Expo. Expo is a further layer of abstraction on top of React Native which leverages the flexibility of JavaScript to bypass the build step for developers. Your JS is bundled up and sent to a native APK or IPA which they build for you. This leaves you to just write your JS (or TS) and focus on the functionality rather than fighting native dependency incompatibilities.

    Profile picture of author Charles Killer
    Charles Killer
    CTO
    App Sapiens
    Q7

    What was the most important reason behind adding React to the technology stack?

    That was an open question, below the most interesting answers from our respondents:

    • React is easy to learn and easy to use.
    • Performance and reusability. We were also interested in other frameworks but they really struggled to get real traction and get a bigger community around them. What eventually made our decision easier to start using it, was when Angular 2 was announced and there was quite a big difference between this and the previous version.
    • It enables the development of extensible and maintainable highly interactive JavaScript apps.
    • It was the technology of choice for the team that implemented our mobile app.
    • We have been building an enterprise-level website and app, we needed to be able to build and support the app in-house without native developers. The performance was also a high priority and we wanted to decouple the CMS from the front end so we chose React to render a headless site and included the new lazy and suspense features so that we could code split the payload and have total control over the rendering of the site on load.
    • Developer experience and happiness with it.
    • Development time, reducing the time it takes to build new features for our platform.
    • Code sharing between web, iOS, and Android. What used to be 3 distinct codebases is now basically one.
    • Cross-platform.
    • Choosing a stable and large developer ecosystem for our front-end development work. Team knowledge, market availability of talent. Decoupling front- and back-end development for better scalability and maintainability Time to market and ability to solve (most) bugs from a single code base. The platform was originally written in C# / Razor which was server-driven. We wanted to move more of the logic and processing to clients’ devices so we decided to go with React to replace server-side Razor rendering.
    • React Native is the best cross-platform mobile app solution at the moment in my opinion. It promises to be a scalable way of building large scale web applications. Bump in quality of experiences as well as no need to have multiple platform-native engineers waiting for another project for their platform. Sharing the engineers between all parts of the stack.
    • Component oriented approach.
    • The community that’s currently working with it, making it the most convenient front-end library to work with today.
    • Ability to add advanced functionalities to the user experience (blocking navigation, asynchronous effects). Use techs that are more appreciated by the developers.

    Key Business Takeaways:

    • React is making time to market shorter and allows solving (most) bugs from a single code base, which makes software delivery more efficient.
    • React has a stable, large developer ecosystem and wide market of available talents.
    • Thanks to component oriented approach and cross-platform features, React is an easy scalable way of building large-scale web & mobile apps.
    Q8

    What were the doubts you had while adding React to your tech stack for the first time?

    That was an open question, below the most interesting answers from our respondents:

    • Before trying React we were already using Backbone, Ember, and Angular. We were afraid that we might be spreading our skills too thin and we were not going to be actually experts in any of those technologies. Fair to say that from the above, React is the only one left in our stack.
    • It was a technology that none of the developers had experience with and it more came about due to necessity than anything else. We needed to develop a cross-platform application which was a new venture for us. We used Meteor with React to handle the cross-platform compiling of one codebase into a website and iOS/Android app.
    • Difficult to learn, adds a layer on top of native code. Often you end up having to know native fundamentals anyway.
    • Being able to integrate CMS specific features with React. i.e. we used Episerver which has a live on-page edit feature, this feature is an iframe that reloads every time an update is made. This was difficult to figure out how to send and receive updates when changes had been made and then re-render the react app.
    • Back in 2016, there wasn’t much talent out there with production experience. Now things are a lot better.
    • Dependency management across platforms.
    • A massive change in the approach meant that there is a risk that we’re spending all the time trying to skill up for nothing. However, it turned out it was time well spent.
    • Is it stable enough?

    Key Business Takeaways:

    While implementing new technology to the company’s stack it’s important to check if:
    • This particular technology is stable enough.
    • Is it able to fulfill your company needs?
    • How to train your current dev team or hire new people with a solid commercial experience?
    Q9

    What are the biggest advantages that React brings to your organization?

    That was an open question, below the most interesting answers from our respondents:

    • Reusable components have benefited several recent projects that we’ve been involved in.
    • Ecosystem, dev tools, new frameworks based on React are amazing. There’s a great community around it. Thanks to that our job is more efficient, products are more performant and at the end that results with happy clients.
    • It allows our developers to work with a small toolset and fundamental, modern JavaScript features and methodologies. It’s easy for a new developer to pick up once they understand the concepts but still works well for more complex features of an app
    • Single codebase.
    • From a front end perspective, we have much more control over the performance and perceived loading times of any React site. It also allows us to add iOS and Android apps to our offering as we can now use React Native in-house.
    • Our web portals are very high quality in terms of visible user bugs.
    • Agility and ability to build new MVP features fast.
    • Increased speed and decreased cost. A single team can manage multiple apps on different platforms.
    • Having one way of building front-ends, across mobile apps and web apps.
    • Common structure and understanding of code base.
    • Cross-platform re-use (web and app), maintainability and well-performing front-ends (rich and fast UX).
    • Development speed and the ability to launch on Android and iOS.
    • Ability to centralize UI components into a single NPM shareable across multiple apps, thus providing the same look & feel to all apps.
    • It is a framework that allows our small team to improve our web app and mobile app development skills at the same time.
    • Speed to market and ability to deliver on desired customer experience.
    • Shareable library of inhouse components, ease of integration of other open source components.

    What are the biggest advantages that React brings to your organization – GraphQL Editor?

    React is a great library for creating GUI in GraphQL Editor. Together with styled components and Gatsby you can make apps much faster than using web components for now. We had started our app development before hooks were available. Now it is much better with hooks playing the main role in state management. There is no such frontend library that can replace it.

    Profile picture of Artur Czemiel
    Artur Czemiel
    Founder
    GraphQL Visual Editor

    Key Business Takeaways:

    While implementing new technology to the company’s stack it’s important to check if:
    • After implementing React, organizations can increase development speed and decrease development cost.
    • Thanks to React, a single team can manage multiple apps on different platforms.
    • React allows companies to build a shareable, reusable library of inhouse components that can be used in different projects, prototypes, and platforms.
    Q10

    What’s still missing in React in your opinion?

    That was an open question, below the most interesting answers from our respondents:

    • Resources on CMS integration. We know we are going to come up against new challenges when we attempt to integrate Sitecore with a headless site.
    • Certain libraries.
    • Pre-built components.
    • A good form builder.
    • Tooling around it. From SSR frameworks like NextJs to testing frameworks to CSS management to bootstrapping boilerplate, most of the existing tools seem to be work in progress. It is getting there though.
    • Solid testing approach and community consensus on the best approach to common problems. There is a wide spectrum of approaches available to handle state management e.g. I would love to be able to create platform-specific SDK from React code.

    Key Business Takeaways:

    Respondents haven’t mentioned a big number of things missing in React, but they’re still missing some libraries and strategies for resolving their software needs.
      Q11

      Would you like to use React for your next project?

      Q12

      Do you think the number of employees using React in your organization will increase in the next 12 months?

      Q13

      What is the strongest alternative to React and why?

      That was an open question, below the most interesting answers from our respondents:

      • From a personal perspective, I’d probably go Vue, from a business perspective we would be interested in the latest Angular (whichever it is now 😉 ) – this is the one framework that was specifically requested by a few of our potential clients.
      • I think that Vue is the strongest alternative to React because it offers a similar USP (a reactive DOM, allows creating a SPA, etc.) and allows the writing of more expressive and declarative code than something like vanilla JS or jQuery would.
      • We run projects in Vue also and this is good for smaller function-specific apps. The eco-system is very strong in Vue and the updates are becoming more in-sync with the way React is going. Both are great tools.
      • Vue.js, learning curve is less.
      • Vue potentially and maybe flutter. Not convinced there is a combo out there that can beat React/React-Native.
      • Probably Vue, and Flutter for App dev is interesting.
      • We are also looking into Vue.js for websites with less complexity, that only require a few interactions – for those sites the footprint of Vue is smaller and suited better, but if we have more complex projects with the possibility to go cross-device, we’d still opt for React
      • Native development, because it offers more control and allows you to easily create platform-specific SDK’s directly
      • Angular because it gives developers a more structured approach that some people prefer. The instant you start a new angular project you have a lot more tools (e.g. Typescript) and structure to work with.

      We decided to use Vue.js instead of React, because the learning curve and documentation made on boarding everyone easier. It fits nicely with our Laravel stack and ecosystem. We have been impressed with speed in which people have adopted Vue.js, which only further progress the framework. We are very happy with our choice and will continue to contribute to the ecosystem.

      Profile picture of author Pete Heslop
      Pete Heslop
      Managing Director
      Steadfast Collective

      Well, this is my main reason as I feel React pushes me a little too far away from vanilla web development.

      I prefer Vue because it’s closer to ordinary web development writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript separately. Compared to React where the HTML and JavaScript are more intertwined and often lead to less readable code.

      Profile picture of author Gaute Meek Olsen
      Gaute Meek Olsen
      Software Engineer and developer enthusiast

      Key Business Takeaways:

      In most cases Vue is mentioned as the strongest React alternative, especially for smaller projects. Enterprise size companies rather want to pick Angular instead of Vue.
        Q14

        When it comes to finding/hiring the right React developer, how would you characterize the current situation?

        Is hiring a React developer harder than one year before? Do you think that it will be easier next year?

        Since around a year ago I would say it is easier to find the right React developer. Obviously times such as Christmas do make it harder but, there is always quality React developers I can get hold of that will be placed.

        I also see a huge spike in the number of users of React and decrease of Angular users.

        Profile picture of author Owen Clements
        Owen Clements
        Associate Javascript Consultant
        RJC Group Ltd

        We find the Finnish IT market very technological and modern. Due to a small domestic market many startups and companies think globally and internationally. Access to investments makes it possible to test new ideas and bring new services and products to their customers quickly. We learned that many companies prefer to work with local IT service providers, and without help, it can be difficult for offshore companies to earn trust and get into the Finnish IT market. The overall experience working with Finns is very good, and we got to work with some great people.

        Profile picture of author George Maksimenko
        George Maksimenko
        Head of Business Development
        Adexin

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