Vite Is Overtaking Webpack as Developers' Favorite Option for Web Development

It is already 2025 on the calendar! It is high time we discuss possible options for web development teams to freshen up their technology stacks. Each year brings along new challenges and opportunities to achieve their coding goals. In this article, we’ll highlight a range of relevant tools that facilitate various aspects of the web development process.

Introduction

In recent years, many technologically advanced industries, including IT, have been seriously affected by the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI). To be more specific about AI's impact on web development, it cannot be disputed that AI technologies bring new approaches to frontend and backend development. For instance, most respondents of Capterra’s Developer Survey 2024 favor AI developer tools and point out their benefits such as increased productivity and higher accuracy in coding.

But at the same time, it should be said that AI tools primarily serve as auxiliaries rather than replacements for essential components of a developer’s tech stack. Core tools such as build tools, runtime environments, frameworks, UI libraries, testing tools, etc. remain the backbone of web development. Such tools can be applied to address relevant JavaScript pain points such as code architecture, state management, debugging, managing dependencies, etc. named in the latestState of JS survey. Therefore, we’ll focus on the key categories of tools used by developers and consider great and not the most obvious options for handling challenging aspects of web development.

Frameworks for Streamlining Development Process

When it comes to enhancing the development experience, frameworks remain essential tools to facilitate the building of robust and scalable apps.

After significant updates last year, the big three frontend frameworks (React, Angular, Vue) will remain highly relevant choices for dev teams. The latest State of JS survey also emphasizes a strong interest across the dev community in other options like Svelte and SolidJS.

It is also a common practice to extend the capabilities of front-end frameworks by combining them with meta-frameworks. They provide numerous built-in features like SSR, SSG, routing, API handling, etc. In this realm, it is worth mentioning such tools as Next.js, Astro, and SvelteKit.

For back-end development, Express.js often becomes the most preferable choice with an extensive set of features for building apps with Node.js. Another option for backend development is Nest.js, which continues gaining popularity among web devs thanks to its modular architecture, scalability, and full TypeScript support. One more promising back-end framework that is highly ranked in State of JS 2024 is Fastify, which promises high speed and low overhead.

The selection of a particular framework (or combinations of them) largely depends on the requirements and complexity of each project. These tools can certainly optimize the workflow and increase the productivity of dev teams, therefore they will remain widely used for building web projects in 2025 and beyond.

Optimizing Development with a New Favorite Build Tool

For years, Webpack has been considered the industry standard for compiling and bundling source code. But in recent years, Vite has become a strong competitor to Webpack and a new favorite option for many developers.

Launched by Evan You in 2020 as a build tool for Vue, Vite quickly gained admiration across the dev community thanks to its emphasis on performance, ease of use, and effective build process. The latest update to version 6.0 (released in November 2024) makes Vite a universal tool with enhanced framework support, performance boosts, a growing ecosystem, and many other novelties. Many well-known companies such as OpenAI, Apple, Google, etc. have already adopted this solution, showcasing its ability to meet the demands of cutting-edge web development. The State of JS 2024 survey deservedly recognized Vite as the technology with the largest year-over-year usage progression.

In 2025, Vite is poised to be a standout choice for many scenarios in modern web development, especially for single-page applications (SPAs) and small to medium-sized projects. However, Webpack, with its mature ecosystem, extensive plugin support, and flexibility, remains a strong contender, particularly for complex apps requiring intricate custom configurations.

Bun: A Speedy Alternative to Node.js and npm in 2025

As web development becomes more complex and time-consuming, tools that simplify workflows and reduce dependencies acquire particular relevance. Bun, an innovative JS runtime, is a bright example of a response to the need for such tools. Launched by the Oven team in 2021 as an all-in-one toolkit, Bun combines the functionality of a runtime environment, a package manager, and a bundler, making it a promising option for modern web apps.

Bun is a relatively new tool but it has the potential to become a game-changer in the JavaScript ecosystem with its simplicity, efficiency, native support for TypeScript, and blazing-fast performance. Unlike Node.js, which requires external tools like npm (yarn) or Webpack (Vite) to cover package management and bundling needs, Bun offers a seamless, integrated experience. Although Bun is faster than even Vite, it is still quite limited in such a significant aspect as working with frameworks, therefore we haven’t considered it in the previous section. But, according to Bun’s website, Framework API is coming soon, so this tool is certainly worth trying in 2025.

Enhanced Data Management

In 2025, the demand for intuitive and data-intensive applications will continue to rise. Therefore it is nice to have at your fingertips a powerful instrument for data management. The DHTMLX Grid widget, crafted by the team behind the renowned JavaScript Gantt chart, suits this purpose perfectly well. This JavaScript data grid allows rendering large amounts of data (100,000+ rows in milliseconds) in a tabular format without performance degradation. Contrary to other popular JS grids like agGrid or Handsontable, DHTMLX Grid has a more intuitive API and developer-friendly documentation, while offering comparable functional capabilities.

The latest version of this widget (9.0) provides a TreeGrid view, flexible data grouping, and summaries for effective analysis. It also supports many other popular features such as filtering and sorting of data, reordering of rows and columns, frozen columns, multiple-column editor types, multiline headers and footers, auto height mode, and much more. There are plenty of options for configuring and customizing the main grid elements. For instance, you change the look and feel of the data table using built-in themes, custom CSS, templates, and HTML content in grid cells. DHTMLX Grid comes with numerous code snippets, demo apps, and integration samples that facilitate the mastering of this widget and its implementation in web projects based on popular front-end frameworks.

Effortless Data Handling and Integration for Dynamic Apps

Processing data in the user interface is just a part of effective data management. It is also important to ensure seamless integration of data from external APIs or servers and its synchronization across various parts of the app that interact with data. To bridge the gap between backend data sources and the UI of your app, you can use data fetching and state management tools.

Axios and Fetch API are two options that can be used to retrieve data from the backend and pass this data to a UI component like DHTMLX Grid.

As for state management, you can consider Redux Toolkit or Zustand. Redux Toolkit is a simplified and more functional alternative to the well-known Redux library that can be used with various frameworks. Zustand is a lightweight and intuitive tool for global and local state management specifically in React apps.

By combining a robust grid table with efficient data-fetching and state management tools, you can build data-intensive applications that are highly dynamic, responsive, and capable of scaling to any level of complexity.

Increasing Code Quality with Testing Tools

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of codebase testing since it helps ensure that your app behaves as expected in various scenarios. The robustness and reliability of your web app can be thoroughly checked with unit, end-to-end, and integration tests. To reduce manual effort and enhance the overall productivity of testing, it is common for web developers to resort to special testing tools.

Those who don’t want to experiment are likely to choose battle-tested tools like Jest and Cypress. But if you are open to trying something new in 2025, there are some promising options.

For instance, if you decide to go with Vite as a build tool for your project, it can be reasonable to consider Vitest. This performant testing framework offers seamless integration with Vite as well as many useful features for effective testing in modern web apps. Playwright is another curious testing tool with superior performance, simplified setup, and powerful tooling to address the needs of developers in end-to-end testing. It is argued that Playwright has the potential to replace Cypress over time.

No matter whether you decide to use one of the established testing frameworks or prefer a newer option, these tools will certainly facilitate the debugging process in your new projects.

Great Opportunities for Modern Web Design

Finally, it is encouraging to see the expanding styling capabilities in modern web applications, driven largely by the rapid evolution of CSS. In recent years, it has been tremendously improved with an array of new features such as subgrid, the :has() pseudo-class, CSS variables, container queries, etc. These additions have significantly enhanced the flexibility and power of CSS, enabling developers to create more dynamic and responsive designs with ease.

And there is much more to come.  According to the State of CSS 2024, highly-anticipated features like conditional logic, mixins, and masonry layouts are underway.

Moreover, you can also rely on other CSS-based tools to achieve various styling goals: CSS frameworks (Tailwind CSS, Bootstrap), CSS-in-JS approach (CSS Modules, Styled Components), Pre-/Post-processors (Sass/SCSS, PostCSS), utilities (Prettier, Autoprefixer).

In addition to the significant advancements within CSS, many JavaScript tools, including frameworks and UI libraries, have also made substantial progress in enhancing their styling capabilities, providing developers with more flexibility and efficiency.

The visual appeal of a web app is a significant factor in a good user experience and overall project success. In 2025, you have many means to greatly enhance the visual development process.

Wrapping Up

Developing a modern web application combining a nice-looking UI and rich functionality often comes at a high price. High project requirements, tight timeframes, and common JavaScript pain points make the development process quite a challenge. If you are facing this task and have some gaps in your technology stack, the tools highlighted in this article give a lot of room for experimenting and getting the right tools for success in 2025.