Ember vs React: Which Frontend Framework is Better in 2025?
April 8, 2025•10 min read
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Author: Alex Vasylenko | Founder of The Frontend Company
The right frontend technology today is about scalability, long-term maintainability, hiring costs, and how fast your team can deliver.
Which one will give you the most value per developer hour? And which choice will still look smart in the next few years?
React is flexible, lightweight, backed by Meta, and powers interfaces at Facebook, Netflix, and Airbnb. Ember, on the other hand, is less trendy — but it offers a full framework out of the box and powers LinkedIn and Apple Music.
In this article, I will compare Ember vs React on performance, routing, bundle size, learning curve, community, maintenance, hiring costs, and use cases so you can confidently decide whether Ember or React is the right fit for your future product.
What Are Ember and React?
Before we dive into the performance and technical comparison, let's look at the basic review of the two technologies:
Ember.js is an open-source JavaScript framework for building ambitious web applications.
Created in 2011 by Yehuda Katz (also known for his work on jQuery and Ruby on Rails), Ember comes with a fully integrated toolkit: routing, state management, CLI, and a templating engine — all included by default. It follows the "convention over configuration" philosophy, which means teams don't need to make endless architectural decisions.
React.js, released by Meta (Facebook) in 2013, is an open-source JavaScript library for building user interfaces. It introduced the now-standard component-based architecture and a virtual DOM for high performance.
Unlike Ember, React focuses only on the view layer — developers choose their tools for routing, data, and everything else. React powers the frontend of Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, and thousands more. Its flexibility and massive ecosystem make it the most popular frontend tool today.
Technical Comparison: Ember vs React
Here, I compare Ember and React across key dimensions. The table below summarizes the most significant differences:
Feature | Ember | React |
|---|---|---|
1. What is it | A full toolkit to build apps (comes with everything included). | A tool to build user interfaces. You add other tools as needed. |
2. Style | Has strong rules and built-in ways to do things. | Very flexible – you decide how to build your app. |
3. Performance | Fast for large apps. Built-in tools help with speed. It may feel heavy for smaller projects. | Very fast at loading and updating UI. Performance depends on how well you build it. |
4. Routing (pages) | Built-in. Works out of the box. | You need to add and set up a router (like react-router). |
5. Size | Bigger (~100 KB). Includes many tools by default. | Smaller (~40 KB). You only add what you need. |
6. Learning Curve | Steeper. Takes time to learn the rules and tools. | Easier to start. Gets more complex as your app grows. |
7. Community | Smaller group, but loyal users. Less content online. | Huge global community. Tons of help, tools, and tutorials. |
8. Long-term Maintenance | Easy to maintain. Updates are stable and well-planned. | Requires more effort. Many tools change often, so you need to keep things updated |
Ember vs React: Performance Comparison
Let's look at how these frontend technologies differ in terms of performance.
Ember Performance
Ember shines in long-lived apps with heavy UI where a structured approach can maintain performance at scale. Its latest rendering engine, Glimmer, excels at handling big templates and lots of DOM elements efficiently.
Ember also supports techniques like lazy loading of routes and components to reduce initial load time.
In practice, Ember tends to have a larger initial bundle (since it includes the whole framework), so small apps may load slightly slower. However, in a large app with many features, Ember's consistency can help maintain good performance as the app grows. It's built-in conventions prevent many performance pitfalls by default.
React Performance
For large apps, React can still perform well, but the team must impose structure to avoid issues, whereas Ember provides that structure by default.
React is designed for highly interactive UIs and performant updating of the DOM. Its key feature is the virtual DOM diffing algorithm, which ensures that only changed components are re-rendered to the real DOM, minimizing costly operations. This makes React very fast for applications with frequently changing states or a lot of user interactions.
The core library is lightweight, which means a quick initial load for small-to-medium apps, but poorly written React components can bottleneck performance.
4 Core Differences Between Ember and React
Here are the four most important differences between Ember and React that will directly impact your product, team, and roadmap:
Routing
The first difference in the Ember vs React comparison is routing.
Ember Routing
It includes a powerful router as a first-class part of the framework and follows a convention-over-configuration approach. Developers declare routes and nested sub-routes, and Ember automatically handles URL management, history, and template/controller hookups. For example, defining a route in Ember will also set up a corresponding data loading (model) hook by convention.
Ember's router was built with deep linking and state management in mind from the start. It even follows RESTful principles for URLs out of the box.
The benefit is that you get a robust routing system without additional libraries, including features like nested routes, query params, redirects, and transitions. This makes Ember ideal for complex, multi-section single-page apps where routing logic might otherwise become tedious.
React Routing
React itself does not include routing – developers typically use the popular React Router library (or others) for client-side routing.
React Router is very powerful and flexible: you can define routes as React components using dynamic routing, lazy load route components, etc.
However, it does require extra setup and learning a separate API. With React, you have the freedom to choose different routing solutions or even no routing (for embedding React in a server-rendered app). The trade-off is additional configuration and ensuring all developers implement routing consistently.
In conclusion, React gives you complete control over routing, while Ember provides a ready-made routing framework.
Community Support and Popularity
The next important thing between Ember and React comparison is community size and support.
Ember Community
Ember has an enthusiastic but much smaller community compared to React. On GitHub, Ember.js has about 22.5k stars and 4.2k forks
– a respectable number, but dwarfed by React. Ember's usage in the wild is quite limited: it's used by <0.1% of websites, according to W3Techs surveys.
There is an official forum (Discuss Ember.js) and an Ember Discord where core team members often hang out to help developers. The community tends to be tight-knit and helpful, but as one engineer noted, it can feel too quiet at times in terms of online buzz or new libraries.
Ember's popularity peaked around 2015-2016 and has declined since, which means fewer new developers are learning it today. However, those who do use Ember often stick with it for its productivity.
React Community
React's community is massive and highly active. On GitHub, it has ~234k stars, indicating its widespread adoption. React consistently ranks at or near the top of developer surveys for the most-used or most-wanted framework. For example, one survey showed React holds about ~40% usage share, making it the second most popular web framework as of 2024.
The popularity of React makes it easier to hire and find developers, and it also benefits from strong corporate support, as many big tech companies have vested interests in maintaining React and its ecosystem. In summary, React has one of the largest dev communities, which results in abundant support and ongoing development.
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Learning Curve
The third difference between React and Ember is the learning curve for developers, which is crucial as it impacts the hiring process and affects how quickly your team can become productive.
Ember's Learning Curve
Ember might require more training, but it pays off with the fast development of complex features once mastered.
For developers coming from other frameworks, Ember's opinions may require unlearning some habits. The framework does a lot for you, but you must first understand those conventions. That said, Ember's documentation is thorough, and once the initial learning is over, developers often appreciate the productivity gained from its conventions.
React's Learning Curve
React has a shallow initial learning curve. With basic knowledge of JavaScript and HTML, a developer can start building simple React components in JSX within a day.
Many developers also find React's mental model easier to grasp than Ember's more abstract concepts. However, the learning curve can spike as an application grows. Because React by itself is just the V in MVC, one must learn how to handle state management, how to do routing, and how to structure a large app.
React is easy to learn, but building a large-scale application with React requires learning many ecosystem tools. For a team with mixed skill levels, React can be easier to pick up for juniors, whereas Ember might favor having some experienced Ember devs to mentor others initially.
Hiring Costs and Developer Availability
This point is the most important from a business perspective and can be a deciding factor in Ember vs React:
1. Availability of Developers
If you post a React job, you'll get many applicants, ranging from junior devs to senior engineers with years of React experience at major companies. Ember's talent pool, while experienced, is limited. Many Ember devs learned it years ago and have since possibly moved to other stacks (given the market trend). You might have to retrain existing developers in Ember or attract talent from the small Ember community.
The geographic distribution also matters: React devs are available globally, whereas Ember expertise might be concentrated in certain regions or companies. For example, you might find Ember devs in communities around companies known to use Ember, like LinkedIn or startups that adopted it early.
2. Salary Expectations
Because of supply and demand, both React and Ember developers command big salaries, but React developers might be slightly more expensive on average due to the intense demand from so many companies.
According to recent data, an average React developer's salary in the US is around $129k/year, whereas an Ember.js developer averages around $116k/year. These figures overlap a lot (and vary by region and experience), so you shouldn't choose one framework over the other purely to save on salary – both are senior frontend skillsets.
However, consider that to attract Ember talent, you might have to pay a premium or offer additional incentives since the candidate pool is smaller.
3. Hiring Time and Risk
Hiring for React is generally faster. You can find contractors, outsource, or hire full-time React devs. For Ember, hiring can take longer; you might end up looking for "Ember or willing-to-learn Ember" candidates.
There's a risk that if an Ember dev leaves your team, finding a replacement will be very difficult. Some companies mitigate this by cross-training, ensuring multiple team members learn Ember rather than relying on a single expert.
4. Team Size Considerations
Ember is often favored in scenarios where you have a small, tight-knit team that will stick with the project long-term, because once the team knows Ember, they can be highly productive as the framework handles a lot for them. React might be better if you expect to scale the team quickly or churn through many contractors because new people can slot in with more familiar skills.
As an example, a large enterprise may prefer React simply because its pool of existing developers already knows it.
In contrast, a startup that started with Ember and has a stable team can develop very fast, but if they need to double the team, they must organize Ember training.
When to Choose Ember or React
Choosing Ember vs React comes down to what's best for your project and team.
When to Choose Ember?
Use Ember for projects like a complex CRM or admin interface, an enterprise dashboard used by many departments, a long-term SaaS product where you want to minimize rewrites, or any app where having an all-in-one solution is more important than being trendy.
LinkedIn chose Ember to deliver a desktop-like experience on the web with reliability, and that's a pattern Ember does well.
When to Choose React?
Use React for projects like a public-facing web app or marketing site where SEO and fast load are critical.
Also, developers use it for an interactive web dashboard or data visualization tools that need custom performance tuning, and when you want to leverage the vast ecosystem.
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Companies Using Ember and React
To understand the Ember vs React clash, we can check who is using it in production.
Ember user list includes:
LinkedIn – Used Ember to deliver a dynamic, app-like web experience with real-time updates and web push notifications.
Apple Music – Parts of the web interface are built with Ember for consistency and performance.
Intercom – A long-time Ember user for its customer messaging platform.
Square – Uses Ember in various internal and customer-facing products.
PlayStation Store – The web-based version was built with Ember to manage a complex UI and commerce flow.
Discourse – The open-source forum platform is fully built on Ember.
Netflix – Listed as an Ember user (likely for internal tools rather than the main app).
Yahoo – Uses Ember in parts of its product ecosystem.
These examples show Ember's strength for companies that value framework stability and strong conventions. It's often chosen for internal tools, dashboards, and long-lived SaaS products where predictable upgrades and maintainability matter.
React user list includes:
Meta (Facebook & Instagram) – Facebook created React and powers the core UIs of both platforms.
Netflix – Uses React for parts of its client-side UI and interactive user flows.
Airbnb – One of React's early adopters; contributed many open-source tools and design systems built on React.
Uber – Uses React extensively across web-based services and dashboards.
Dropbox – React is a core part of their frontend stack.
Reddit – The full redesign of reddit.com is built on React.
Atlassian – Products like Jira and Confluence use React for scalable enterprise UIs.
The New York Times – Interactive articles and features often leverage React.
Tesla – React is used in parts of their marketing and product websites.
React is everywhere. It's the industry standard for modern frontend development, used across startups, enterprises, and global tech giants. Its flexibility, performance, and massive ecosystem make it the go-to choice for building everything from small widgets to large-scale platforms.
Conclusion
Here is my verdict on the Ember vs React clash! For most businesses in 2025, React will be the default choice due to its popularity and versatility, especially for consumer-facing products or when you expect to scale your frontend team quickly. React offers a balance of performance, community support, and future-proofing that is hard to beat. But it isn't about which is universally better, but which is better for you.
In making your decision, weigh the total cost of ownership and the strategic needs of your product. If unsure, consider prototyping a feature in each or consult engineers who have experience in both. In some cases, the answer might even be a hybrid or a migration path (e.g., use Ember for now if your system is built around it, but plan to gradually introduce React for new parts, as some companies have done.
Whatever you choose, ensure your team is on board and ready to leverage the framework to its fullest potential.
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FAQ
Alex Vasylenko is the founder of The Frontend Company, DBC and several other successful startups. A dynamic tech entrepreneur, he began his career as a frontend developer at Deloitte and Scandinavia's largest banking company. In 2023, Alex was honored as one of 'Top 10 Emerging Entrepreneurs' by USA Today.
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