Vue vs React in My Own Repos: Why React Is My Default, and Where I Still Pick Vue

I counted the front ends in my GitHub folder. About twenty are React: web consoles, Next.js sites and Expo mobile apps. Two are Vue, and both are recent.

So this post isn't about a weekend where I ported a Vue codebase to React. That never happened. What did happen is less dramatic and more useful. For anything that behaves like an application, React became my default and stayed there. For two specific kinds of project I still choose Nuxt on purpose, and I'd choose it again.

Where React won, and why

When I rebuilt BoltHR's web console in June 2025, the very first commit was "initial commit with shadcn added". There was no framework debate. By then the choice had made itself, for four reasons.

1. One mental model from browser to phone

Nearly every product I build has a mobile app beside the web app: BoltHR's employee app, Opero's handheld scanner, Hoadhaa Estate's tenant and landlord app. They're all Expo and React Native, and they all use TanStack Query, the same hooks pattern, the same axios-plus-interceptor setup and the same TypeScript types as the web clients.

A data hook in the BoltHR web console reads almost exactly like the one in the mobile app. I can work across three codebases in a day without changing how I think. Vue doesn't have a mobile story I'd bet a production app on, and that one gap settles most of my decisions.

2. The admin-console ecosystem

ERPs are mostly forms, tables and side panels. In React I can put one together from parts I already trust: Radix and shadcn/ui for primitives, TanStack Table for grids, React Hook Form with Zod for validation. BoltHR's web app gives every feature the same three files:

features/payroll/
  payroll-page.tsx        page container
  payroll-table.tsx       TanStack Table grid
  payroll-form-sheet.tsx  create/edit form in a side sheet

Opero's Counter, Agent Portal and Platform Admin use the same stack: React 19, Vite, TanStack Query, Zustand. A new screen in any of them is a short copy-and-adapt, not a design exercise. Vue has good equivalents for most of these pieces, but I would be assembling them one by one rather than reusing a toolkit I have already tested in production.

3. TypeScript is just TypeScript

A React component is a function, so props, generics and hook return types flow through plain tsc. Vue 3 is good at TypeScript now, but it still needs its own type checker: the Vue projects I maintain run vue-tsc and nuxt typecheck as a separate step. In a small project I don't notice. In a codebase with forty-odd API hooks, I want the compiler that everything else already uses.

4. Handover

I work in a small team, and several of my projects end up with a client's developers or a contractor. React is the stack people already know. That isn't a technical argument, but it's a real one.

What React costs me

React isn't free, and I'd be lying if I said it was.

• •useEffect and stale closures still cause the bugs that take the longest to find. Vue's reactivity simply doesn't have that class of bug.
• •Too many decisions. Router, data layer, forms, state, styling: React makes you pick all of them. My fix is to pick once and copy the setup everywhere, which is why so many of my apps look alike underneath.
• •Next.js has its own learning curve. The App Router's caching rules and the server/client component boundary are powerful, but for a CRUD admin panel they're often more machinery than the job needs. That's why BoltHR's console and Opero's apps are plain Vite single-page apps, not Next.js.

The two places I still pick Vue

A marketing page that ships no JavaScript

Opero needed a landing page. The first version was one hand-written HTML file. Our decision record turned down Vite and Next.js as "a build, a package and a port for one static page". The same day it was rebuilt as a Nuxt 4 app, so its dozen sections could be real components with shared copy. It is still statically generated with nuxt generate and served by nginx.

An SEO audit later found the page was shipping about 200 KB of Vue runtime for content with no client-side behaviour at all. The FAQ is native

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  features: { noScripts: true },
})