Preact

Preact

Preact is a fast, lightweight alternative to React. It has a similar API to React but with a much smaller footprint, making it well-suited for websites where performance is critical.
Preact image
react lightweight fast performance

Preact: Fast Lightweight Alternative

Preact is a fast, lightweight alternative to React. It has a similar API to React but with a much smaller footprint, making it well-suited for websites where performance is critical.

What is Preact?

Preact is a lightweight user interface library that aims to provide the performance advantages of React while maintaining a small code size. Preact is built on top of the Virtual DOM mechanism that React uses, but is much faster and sits at around 3kb so it can be used on mobile devices and slower networks.

Some key characteristics of Preact:

  • Open source, FREE library for building fast and efficient user interfaces
  • Very small size, sitting at around 3kb gzipped
  • Extremely fast Virtual DOM implementation, giving top-tier performance
  • Subset of the React API, but with a fairly complete compatibility layer allowing apps to be ported from React easily
  • Components for common use cases like state management included out of the box
  • Good documentation and community support

Preact is commonly used when building Progressive Web Apps where speed and efficiency are top priorities, as well as for sites targeting geographical areas with slow networks. Its small size makes it suitable for all types of web projects though.

Preact Features

Features

  1. Virtual DOM diffing algorithm
  2. Component-based architecture
  3. Server-side rendering support
  4. Small size - only 3kB gzipped
  5. Similar API to React

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Very fast performance

Lightweight and small bundle size

Easy to get started

Good documentation

Active community support

Cons

Less ecosystem support than React

Fewer features than React

Less popular than React


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