I find the Krausest benchmarks[0] to be useful for these sorts of comparisons. There are always flaws in benchmarks, and this one particularly is limited to the performance for DOM manipulation of a relatively simple web application (the minimal VanillaJS implementation is about 50 lines of code). That said, Krausest and the others who work on it do a good job of ensuring the different apps are well-optimised but still idiomatic, and it works well as a test of what the smallest meaningful app might look like for a given framework.
I typically compare Vanilla, Angular, SolidJS, Svelte, Vue Vapor, Vue, and React Hooks, to get a good spread of the major JS frameworks right now. Performance-wise, there are definitely differences, but tbh they're all much of a muchness. React famously does poorly on "swap rows", but also there's plenty of debate about how useful "swap rows" actually is as a benchmark.
But if you scroll further down, you get to the memory allocation and size/FCP sections, and those demonstrate what a behemoth React is in practice. 5-10× larger than SolidJS or Svelte (compressed), and approximately 5× longer FCP scores, alongside a significantly larger runtime memory than any other option.
React is consistently more similar to a full Angular application in most of the benchmarks there than to one of the more lightweight (but equally capable) frameworks in that list. And I'm not even doing a comparison with microframeworks like Mithril or just writing the whole thing in plain JS. And given the point of this article is about shaving off moments from your FCP by delaying rendering, surely it makes sense to look at one of the most significant causes to FCP, namely bundle size?
I typically compare Vanilla, Angular, SolidJS, Svelte, Vue Vapor, Vue, and React Hooks, to get a good spread of the major JS frameworks right now. Performance-wise, there are definitely differences, but tbh they're all much of a muchness. React famously does poorly on "swap rows", but also there's plenty of debate about how useful "swap rows" actually is as a benchmark.
But if you scroll further down, you get to the memory allocation and size/FCP sections, and those demonstrate what a behemoth React is in practice. 5-10× larger than SolidJS or Svelte (compressed), and approximately 5× longer FCP scores, alongside a significantly larger runtime memory than any other option.
React is consistently more similar to a full Angular application in most of the benchmarks there than to one of the more lightweight (but equally capable) frameworks in that list. And I'm not even doing a comparison with microframeworks like Mithril or just writing the whole thing in plain JS. And given the point of this article is about shaving off moments from your FCP by delaying rendering, surely it makes sense to look at one of the most significant causes to FCP, namely bundle size?
[0]: https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/2025/table...