Preact is a fast and lightweight alternative to React, offering a similar API and functionality while being smaller in size. It provides a Virtual DOM implementation, component-based architecture, and state management capabilities, making it ideal for building efficient and performant web applications. Preact is actively maintained and optimized for speed and memory usage, making it a popular choice for projects where a smaller footprint is desired.
SolidJS is a declarative JavaScript library for building user interfaces, focusing on performance and reactivity. It offers a reactive and composable API that allows developers to create efficient and scalable web applications. SolidJS leverages fine-grained reactivity to update only the necessary components when data changes, resulting in fast rendering and minimal re-renders.
Preact has been around for longer and has gained a significant following in the React community. It is widely used and has a large user base. SolidJS, on the other hand, is a relatively newer library but has been gaining popularity due to its performance and simplicity.
Size
Preact is known for its small size and lightweight footprint. It is designed to be a drop-in replacement for React with a similar API but with a much smaller bundle size. SolidJS also prides itself on being lightweight and performs well in terms of bundle size.
Performance
Both Preact and SolidJS are known for their excellent performance. Preact focuses on minimizing runtime overhead and optimizing rendering performance. SolidJS takes a different approach by using fine-grained reactivity and a virtual DOM diffing algorithm to achieve high performance.
Developer Experience
Preact provides a familiar React-like API, making it easy for React developers to transition to Preact. It has a large ecosystem of plugins and libraries built around it. SolidJS, on the other hand, introduces a new reactive programming model and has a smaller ecosystem compared to Preact.
Compatibility
Preact aims to be a drop-in replacement for React and is compatible with most React libraries and components. SolidJS, although it shares some similarities with React, has its own ecosystem and may require some adjustments when migrating existing React projects.
Community and Support
Preact has a larger and more established community with extensive documentation, tutorials, and resources available. It has been battle-tested and used in production by many companies. SolidJS, being a newer library, has a smaller community but is growing rapidly and has an active Discord community for support.
