Table of Contents
Most Popular Projects Overall
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2021/5
- Total stars24.3k☆
Links
- GitHub
Vite
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2020/4
- Total stars35.5k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Next.js
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2016/10
- Total stars78.9k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
React
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2013/5
- Total stars180.0k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Tauri
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2019/7
- Total stars25.7k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Tailwind CSS
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2017/10
- Total stars51.6k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
VS Code
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2015/9
- Total stars125.9k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Slidev
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2021/4
- Total stars16.9k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
NocoDB
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2017/10
- Total stars20.9k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Vue.js
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2013/7
- Total stars191.8k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Front-end Frameworks
React
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2013/5
- Total stars180.0k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Vue.js
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2013/7
- Total stars191.8k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Svelte
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2016/11
- Total stars54.3k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Angular
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2014/9
- Total stars78.6k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Solid
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2018/4
- Total stars13.3k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
For the first time since we run the JavaScript Rising Stars, React is the UI framework number one but if we take into account the fact that Vue.js is split into two repositories (for the versions 2 and 3), Vue.js is still the virtual leader.
The big change is the rise of Svelte that takes the spot number 3, before Angular.
More and more tools or components include Svelte among the target frameworks (we mentioned Vite for example).
One of the big news of the year is that Rich Harris, the creator of Svelte is joining the tech company Vercel whose most successful project is next.js.
Like Next.js, Svelte has its own meta framework to build performant applications: SvelteKit.
At the position number 5, Solid is an interesting alternative to React. Components are written using JSX but it does not rely on the Virtual DOM like React does.
It has inspired Mitosis, a tool to write and compile components targeting any framework: React, Vue.js, Angular, Svelte...
Node.js Frameworks
Next.js
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2016/10
- Total stars78.9k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Nest
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2017/2
- Total stars43.3k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Strapi
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2015/9
- Total stars42.1k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Remix
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2020/10
- Total stars10.1k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Nuxt
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2016/10
- Total stars39.1k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
The main UI frameworks have their own "meta framework" to build modern and scalable applications, providing features like routing, server-side rendering, static generation of pages ahead of time, optimized builds for production...
- React has Next.js, number 1 of the category, that can be considered as a pioneer in this space
- Vue.js has Nuxt, now split between versions for Vue.js v2 and v3
- Svelte has SvelteKit
Remix, a full stack framework to build React applications, is the newcomer of the category. It's one of the biggest stories of the year. It was created by the authors of React Router and it was only available to paying supporters until October.
The project got a lot of traction (and $3M in seed funding, it can help too!) since it was made public. Its motto is clear: "Web Fundamentals, Modern UX" as its APIs follow as much as possible the web standards (HTTP responses, form submissions...).
Two examples that blew my mind.
To handle form submission, you can just do... normal form submission. It seems obvious but developers are so used to writing event.preventDefault()
to avoid the form submission. The best is that it allows the form to work even if JavaScript is disabled! It's really interesting how Remix challenges behaviors we take for granted, "remixing" old principles with a new approach that focuses on both user and developer experience.
Also it handles nested routes in a very smart way, being able to load data needed by all the components on a given page in an efficient way, instead of generating a waterfall of HTTP calls that often leads to a lot of spinner indicators on the screen.
Besides these meta frameworks, at the position number 2, Nest is the leader of the more conventional server-side Node.js frameworks, not tight to any UI library.
At the position number 3, Strapi is the leader of the "headless CMS", those applications that provide a rich dashboard to let users manage data and a modern API to let developers build anything from data. The latest version (4) provides a design system built on top of a React components library.
Build Tools
Vite
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2020/4
- Total stars35.5k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
esbuild
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2016/6
- Total stars29.6k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
swc
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2017/12
- Total stars19.0k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Turborepo
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2021/10
- Total stars4.5k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Webpack
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2012/3
- Total stars60.1k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Guest Writer: Sébastien Lorber
Sébastien is a React early adopter, working with Facebook Open-Source on Docusaurus.
He runs a weekly newsletter about React and React Native: This Week in React

In 2021, the already existing trends have strengthened.
Native ES modules adoption continues. Vite has been widely adopted (faster than snowpack), leading to a new ecosystem of tools (like Vitest), a modern ES-based test framework). ES modules are also adopted in the Node.js ecosystem, but it's not always easy. TypeScript even delayed ES modules support in Node.js.
More frontend tools than even are being built in other languages (see awesome-js-tooling-not-in-js), mostly for performance reasons.
Lee Robinson wrote that Rust Is The Future of JavaScript Infrastructure. Rust is particularly interesting because of its great performances and interoperability with JavaScript. NAPI-RS allows JavaScript and Rust to communicate with each other without any serialization cost. Next.js is betting on SWC, an extensible Rust compiler that allows them to port the most popular Babel plugins to Rust.
Parcel 2 has been released with a new Rust compiler. The Rome toolchain is also being rewritten in Rust, but one of its founders Jamie Kyle just left the company without much information.
Rust is clearly the leading non-JS language, but not the only one offering great performances: Bun is written in Zig. Turborepo and esbuild are written in Go. Note that Evan Wallace left Figma: it may give him more time to work on esbuild.
In the monorepo space, Lerna remains widely used but is not very well maintained. nx, a monorepo tool that helps reduce build time significantly, has been growing fast. Its newer competitor Turborepo has benefited from great marketing after being acquired by Vercel.
Vue Ecosystem
Slidev
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2021/4
- Total stars16.9k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage

Vue Element Admin
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2017/4
- Total stars73.3k☆
Links
- GitHub
Headless UI
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2020/9
- Total stars12.4k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Naive UI
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2021/6
- Total stars7.3k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
vue-next
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2018/6
- Total stars26.6k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
One year of Vue 3's official release, we see the ecosystem is growing rapidly with a lot of great innovations.
New syntaxes like <script setup>
in Vue 3 core makes the component authoring experience into a new level. The new VS Code extension Volar brings the first-class TypeScript support to Vue; a new state manager Pinia, which is built ground up with the new Composition API, becoming the successors of Vuex.
With Vite becoming the new default tooling of Vue, meta-frameworks like Nuxt 3, Quasar and VitePress are now using Vite as their default engine. Providing tremendous developer experience improvements and opening up many new gates for innovations.
The community also put many efforts on aligning Vue 2's DX to Vue 3 and making the migration process smoother. It was a great year for Vue devs to get huge improvements for both DX and performance of their apps. Excited to see what is upcoming in 2022!
React Ecosystem
Next.js
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2016/10
- Total stars78.9k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Ant Design
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2015/4
- Total stars76.7k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
MUI
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2014/8
- Total stars74.0k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Remix
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2020/10
- Total stars10.1k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
react-use
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2018/10
- Total stars27.1k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
CSS in JavaScript
vanilla-extract
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2021/3
- Total stars4.4k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Styled Components
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2016/8
- Total stars35.6k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Stitches
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2020/4
- Total stars4.5k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Twin
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2020/2
- Total stars5.2k☆
Links
- GitHub
Emotion
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2017/5
- Total stars14.2k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Testing
Playwright
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2019/11
- Total stars31.8k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Storybook
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2016/3
- Total stars67.8k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Cypress
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2015/3
- Total stars35.3k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Puppeteer
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2017/5
- Total stars75.4k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Jest
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2013/12
- Total stars37.5k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Mobile
React Native
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2015/1
- Total stars100.2k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Ionic
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2013/8
- Total stars45.9k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Expo
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2016/8
- Total stars15.6k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Quasar
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2015/10
- Total stars20.2k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Flipper
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2018/4
- Total stars10.3k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Desktop
Tauri
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2019/7
- Total stars25.7k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Electron
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2013/4
- Total stars99.6k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Svelte NodeGUI
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2021/1
- Total stars2.6k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
NodeGUI
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2019/5
- Total stars7.4k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Neutralino
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2018/6
- Total stars4.8k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Static Sites
Next.js
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2016/10
- Total stars78.9k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Astro
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2021/3
- Total stars8.8k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Nuxt
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2016/10
- Total stars39.1k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Nuxt 3
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2021/3
- Total stars4.0k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Gatsby
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2015/5
- Total stars52.1k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
State Management
Zustand
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2019/4
- Total stars12.5k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
XState
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2015/9
- Total stars18.4k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Jotai
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2020/8
- Total stars6.6k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Recoil
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2020/5
- Total stars15.3k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Immer
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2017/12
- Total stars21.8k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
GraphQL
Prisma
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2019/6
- Total stars19.2k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Hasura GraphQL Engine
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2018/6
- Total stars25.0k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Redwood
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2019/6
- Total stars10.4k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Gatsby
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2015/5
- Total stars52.1k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
GraphQL Code Generator
Trends in 2021
GitHub data
- Created2016/12
- Total stars8.1k☆
Links
- GitHub
- Homepage
Conclusion
To build modern sites and applications, it seems we have entered the era of the meta frameworks: Next.js, Nuxt, SvelteKit... and the promising newcomer Remix.
Famous members of the JavaScript community joined tech companies to work on these solutions:
- Kent C. Dodds joined the Remix team and he speaks highly about how it enables him to "build amazing user experiences and still be happy with the code".
- It seems Vercel hired everyone else: Rich Harris, the creator of Svelte, Sebastian Markbåge from the React core team and Jared Palmer and its now open source solution to manage monorepos (Turborepo)... it looks like a Dream Team!
About the tooling, the need for speed led to a shift towards languages like Rust and Go instead of JavaScript.
Lee Robinson made a strong statement: Rust Is The Future of JavaScript Infrastructure and we mentioned the rise of Rust language several times:
- Tauri is built in Rust
- The project Rome made a strong move from JavaScript to Rust
- Next.js latest version (12) includes swc compiler, written in Rust
SWC is also used by Deno, the server-side runtime that was the winner in 2020. And we can tell that Deno is still a thing! It keeps receiving enhancements and Deno Deploy was made public: it's a solution to build and deploy serverless functions that run at the "edge", close to the users.
Speaking of serverless functions, edge computing was also an important theme in 2021. We have solutions like Vercel Edge Functions, CloudFlare Workers or Netlify Edge to run backend code close to the users. Meta frameworks like Next.js or Remix take advantage of edge computing, making the integration of backend code in React applications a breeze.
Are we going to enter the Golden Age of JavaScript full-stack applications in 2022?
The TOP 3
The trendiest project of the year is zx, a brand new tool by Google to write simple Command Line scripts in JavaScript or TypeScript.
Basically it lets you embed any bash expression (
ls
,cat
,git
... anything!) in your code andawait
for the result using JavaScript template literals.It includes utilities provided by several popular packages:
fetch
in the browserAt position number 2, Vite is a building tool that uses esbuild compiler to provide great performance. At the beginning it was linked to the Vue.js community but now it has setups for the main UI frameworks: React, Svelte, Lit.
At position number 3, Next.js keeps its position of leading "meta framework" for the React world.
Tauri
At position 5, Tauri is a solution to build desktop applications using web technologies.
Compared to Electron it's written in Rust and it does not ship Node.js runtime with every application. The version 1.0 was released in beta in May.
Special pick
It's not in the TOP 10 but Astro is one of the projects of the year. Astro is a tool to build web sites that load faster because they ship less JavaScript.
The concept is close to static site generation (SSG) but the big difference is that Astro lets you include dynamic pieces of interactivity in your pages called "islands".
Different strategies can be applied to render dynamic components in the client-side:
The best is that Astro pages can be built with a combination of HTML and components written with any framework: React, Vue.js or Svelte...