Top 10 Frameworks for Web Development

Today's users expect web apps to be highly performant, capable, and reliable. Web frameworks are the key tools that enable developers to create these exceptional online services. By speeding up development, enhancing application quality, and improving reliability, web frameworks play a crucial role in modern web development.

In this article, we highlight the top 10 frameworks for web development, each chosen for its popularity among developers, rich feature set, and technical capabilities. Finding the best framework for your organization requires more than just selecting the right technology; it’s about matching the framework to your team’s skills and experience for maximum impact.

While all the frameworks on this list offer valuable features, only a few will be the perfect fit for your organization. Explore our list, analyze the strengths of each framework, and discover which ones can help your team build exceptional services that meet user expectations.

Top 10 Frameworks for Web Development

1. Node.js

Comfortably the most popular web development technology amongst professional developers, Node.js is an exceptional tool for building applications from the ground up. Used as a building block for many of the most popular frameworks currently available such as Angular, React, and Express.js—Node provides essential tooling and structure to enable better web development.

Node is designed with the primary goal of building highly scalable network applications. Leaning on an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime, Node is capable of handling large numbers of concurrent connections using a somewhat unique concurrency model that doesn’t rely on complex thread management, blocking I/O calls, or suffering from dead-locking.

The capabilities of Node.js and the seemingly endless scalability that the framework promotes have made the framework immensely popular amongst developers and promoted the tool to the top of our list.

2. React.js

Following close behind Node.js on the list of developers’ most popular frameworks of recent years, React is a component-based frontend library that has become a benchmark of modern application development. While React is technically a library and not a framework, it’s a tool that is used and discussed as a framework amongst developers due to the vast amount of resources and structure it provides for projects.

Here, we have vast amounts of ReactJS resources to help your firm reach its targets using one of the web’s most popular and productive frameworks.

When first released by Facebook in 2013 React was an early pioneer in the use of a virtual DOM to vastly increase the speed that DOM manipulation could take place in web apps. Some of the framework’s other stand-out features are its ability to render pages both server-side and client-side to optimize performance, SEO, and developer considerations on the fly.

As a framework developed and maintained by Facebook, the popularity and productivity of React shouldn’t come as a surprise to developers.

3. jQuery

One of the most mature frameworks currently available, jQuery has remained immensely popular since its launch in 2006 and continues to rank among the top 5 tools even today. Billed as a small, fast, lightweight, yet feature-rich JavaScript library, jQuery supports features and tooling that have quickly become essential parts of modern web development.

Since its launch, jQuery has single-handedly transformed JavaScript development for web developers. In addition to providing the tools and support that enable rapid DOM traversal and exceptional style and animations, jQuery supports extensive additional libraries and documentation to provide functionality to developers.

Despite being around for well over a decade, jQuery still makes its way onto our list of top 10 frameworks for web development with performance credentials, features, and functionality that make it impossible to ignore.

4. Angular

One of the most prominent front-end frameworks amongst web developers today, Angular is one of Google’s biggest and most productive web development projects. Taking over from the highly effective Angular.js, Angular decided to throw out the rulebook and architecture in 2016 and re-write the framework from the ground up.

Considered a “batteries included” model of framework development, Angular includes all the controllers, libraries, and components necessary for a productive web app right out the box. In our web framework benchmark tests, Angular was proven to be much more performant and capable than its predecessor and a front runner for consideration amongst other web technologies.

5. Vue.js

One of the youngest frameworks on our list, Vue has quickly risen to prominence amongst competing technologies and has proven to deliver a lot for its teams. A framework based on a more modern architecture in MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel), the lightweight and progressive approach to Vue makes it a tool with a wide range of use cases and applications.

For developers, some of the tool’s biggest advantages come from being easy to learn, easy to teach, and being able to onboard new team members relatively quickly. In our benchmark comparison tests, Vue was also shown to be one of the best-performing tools among its closest competitors.

Despite not being actively developed by any of the big names in the tech industry, Vue makes its way onto our list due to its impressive performance and forward-looking design credentials.

6. Django

The only Python-based technology on our list, Django is a tool that is highly popular amongst developers due to its clean architecture design, inherent application security, and remarkably scalable solutions. Following an MVT (model-view-template) design, Django allows developers to build applications at a rapid pace and stand in as both a back-end and front-end framework for teams.

For several years now, Django has been used to support some of the web’s biggest applications from Instagram and YouTube to Nasa. Much like Angular, Django is very much batteries-included and despite being slightly less performant than its competition, creates an exceptional tool in the full-stack capabilities, resources, and features it makes available to its developers.

7. Ruby on Rails

The most mature framework to make its way onto our list, Ruby on Rails has remained an exceptionally popular and productive framework for almost two decades and still supports more than 5% of the web. Even today, the framework remains one of the most highly appreciated web frameworks currently available.

Developers working with Rails benefit from its suite of powerful libraries and tools to create exceptional cloud-based applications. The advantages it enables include extensive automation and rapid application development. Despite being around since 2004, sites such as Airbnb, Groupon, and Github lean on the technology today for its abundant capabilities.

While Ruby on Rails isn’t as performant as some of its more modern competitors, it’s a mature and capable framework still enabling exceptional capabilities for its teams.

8. ASP.NET Core

Microsoft’s latest iteration of its highly popular .NET framework is a cross-platform open-source version of .NET tooling. Since 2016, the company has been revising and restructuring its flagship technologies with the latest version of .NET supporting each of the major platforms in addition to extensive cloud applications.

Alongside this modernization, Microsoft has vastly improved its tech stack with forward-looking design and architecture to improve on what was already a highly capable platform. Today, ASP.NET core is a modular web framework that can seamlessly interact with JavaScript client-side tools.

While the framework comes in at number eight on our top 10 list, it could be considered number one for developing exceptionally large-scale applications where the robust design and tooling can comfortably outperform other frameworks.

9. Laravel

The only PHP framework to make it onto our list of top 10 frameworks for web development, Laravel is a highly popular back-end framework capable of building exceptional web apps of its own. Prioritizing architecture and design as a key component of the framework, Laravel can do a lot to ensure developers can build apps with a robust foundation.

Features of the Laravel framework include its capable package management system and built-in dependency manager. These allow developers to easily add features to enterprise applications and build well-tested and secure systems by assembling existing components.

While Laravel is somewhat behind in outright performance metrics, the framework more than makes up for these shortfalls in development time, application security, and the remarkable apps it enables.

10. Spring

A Java-based MVC framework, Spring is routinely used to build exceptionally large-scale applications such as TicketMaster and Wix. The framework is capable of dealing with surges of concurrent users and exceptionally high demand by leaning on its heavyweight and highly-opinionated design credentials.

For new developers, the learning curve to accessing the abundant performance and functionality of the framework can be steep. Once climbed, however, the framework is one with a wide range of use cases from micro-services to large cloud-based applications.

In our benchmark comparison, Spring was shown to be our highest performing framework widely used at scale amongst developers.

Best Web Development Frameworks for Your Teams

Creating highly performing web apps is about more than peer credits and bragging rights amongst developers. Your web apps are your shopfront, customer service portal, inventory, and marketing efforts rolled into one. Getting the web app right is key to attracting new users, keeping existing customers onside, and growing your audience.

Each of the entries in our list of top 10 web development frameworks is more than capable of doing just that. The key to accessing these exceptional credentials and unlocking their performance in your company is choosing the one that’s right for your teams, technologies, and organization.