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Handlebars VS React

Compare Handlebars VS React and see what are their differences

Handlebars logo Handlebars

Handlebars is a JavaScript template library that is, more or less, based on ...

React logo React

A JavaScript library for building user interfaces
  • Handlebars Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-06-28
  • React Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-19

Handlebars features and specs

  • Simplicity
    Handlebars provides a straightforward and easy-to-learn syntax for templating, making it accessible for developers with varying levels of experience.
  • Logic-less Templates
    Encourages the separation of logic and design by only allowing minimal logic in templates. This promotes a cleaner code base and separation of concerns.
  • Extensibility
    Handlebars allows for custom helpers and partials which enable extending the templating functionality as needed.
  • Precompilation
    Templates can be precompiled, improving performance by reducing client-side parsing and rendering time.
  • Wide Adoption and Community Support
    As a popular templating engine, Handlebars has a large community of users and contributors, which provides abundant resources, plugins, and support.

Possible disadvantages of Handlebars

  • Limited Logic
    The logic-less nature of Handlebars means it supports only very basic conditionals and loops, which can be limiting for complex scenarios.
  • Verbosity
    Handlebars templates can become verbose, especially when using custom helpers or partials extensively.
  • Initial Learning Curve
    For developers coming from more logic-oriented templating engines, adjusting to Handlebars' logic-less paradigm can take some effort.
  • Dependency Management
    In larger projects, managing dependencies between templates, partials, and helpers can become complex and cumbersome.
  • Lack of Reactivity
    Handlebars does not include built-in support for data reactivity, making it less suitable for dynamic, real-time updates compared to modern frameworks like React or Vue.

React features and specs

  • Component-Based Architecture
    React encourages the creation of reusable UI components, which can be leveraged to build complex user interfaces efficiently. This promotes better code organization and separation of concerns.
  • Virtual DOM
    React uses a virtual DOM to optimize and accelerate the process of updating the browser’s DOM, significantly improving application performance.
  • Strong Community and Ecosystem
    React has a large and active community, which means plenty of third-party libraries, tools, and community support are readily available to assist developers.
  • JSX Syntax
    React’s JSX syntax allows developers to write HTML structures within JavaScript code, making the code more readable and easier to debug.
  • Unidirectional Data Flow
    React promotes a unidirectional data flow, which helps maintain the predictability and ease of debugging, especially for larger applications.
  • Extensive Documentation
    React's official documentation is comprehensive, well-organized, and provides numerous examples and tutorials to help developers get started and advance their skills.

Possible disadvantages of React

  • Steep Learning Curve
    React comes with a steep learning curve for beginners, especially those unfamiliar with JavaScript ES6 and JSX syntax.
  • Boilerplate Code
    Setting up a React project often requires boilerplate code, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming compared to simpler frameworks.
  • Fast-Paced Development
    React and its associated libraries evolve rapidly, necessitating frequent updates and learning new patterns, which can be overwhelming for developers.
  • Complexity in Larger Applications
    As a React application grows in size, managing state and props across components can become complex, sometimes necessitating additional state management libraries like Redux or Context API.
  • SEO Challenges
    React, being a JavaScript library, can present challenges for search engine optimization (SEO) due to Googlebot's limitations in executing JavaScript, although this can be mitigated with server-side rendering (SSR) or static site generation (SSG).

Handlebars videos

MTB Handlebars: Our Top 5 Picks for 2018!

More videos:

  • Review - Roland Sands Handlebars Review at RevZilla.com
  • Review - KST Kustoms Handlebars Review

React videos

What Is React?

More videos:

  • Review - NOT Worth Buying? Nike EPIC REACT FLYKNIT 2 vs Epic React REVIEW
  • Review - NIKE REACT INFINITY RUN FLYKNIT REVIEW | The Ginger Runner

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Handlebars and React)
Javascript UI Libraries
Development
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Tool
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Handlebars and React

Handlebars Reviews

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React Reviews

Top JavaScript Frameworks in 2025
ReactJS is a JavaScript based UI development library which is developed by Facebook. It is an open-source framework which is widely used by developers for web development. One of the major reasons why React.JS is widely popular is because it uses Virtual DOM. This enables developers to create web applications faster.
Source: solguruz.com
The 20 Best Laravel Alternatives for Web Development
React’s the cool kid on the block, turning heads since Facebook dropped it at our feet. Building dynamic user interfaces feels less like coding, more like crafting with this JavaScript library.
Top 9 best Frameworks for web development
React uses a virtual DOM to optimize the performance of UI updates and follows a one-way data flow for easy tracking of data changes. With its active community and abundance of third-party resources and libraries, React is a solid choice for web development.
Source: www.kiwop.com
9 Best JavaScript Frameworks to Use in 2023
React can be used as a base in the development of single-page or mobile applications. However, React is concerned with rendering data to the DOM, so creating React apps usually requires additional libraries for state management, routing, and interaction with an API.
Source: ninetailed.io
JavaScript: What Are The Most Used Frameworks For This Language?
Some of its top features include server-side rendering, automatic code splitting, client-side routing, built-in CSS support, static site generation and API routes. Overall, Next.JS is a powerful and flexible framework that provides developers with a simple and intuitive way to build complex React applications with ease. It is widely used in the React community and has a...
Source: www.bocasay.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, React seems to be a lot more popular than Handlebars. While we know about 814 links to React, we've tracked only 65 mentions of Handlebars. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Handlebars mentions (65)

  • Chapter 7: HTML part two
    For a more robust approach, we'd probably need to install a templating language of some kind, such as Twig, EJS, Handlebars, Pug or Mustache (this is not a complete list!). Reading the documentation for posthtml-modules, you'll notice it doesn't mention package.json or any of the approaches we've used in this guide. Instead, the examples are in JavaScript and we've advised to add this to our Node application. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • How to send emails using Express and NodeJS
    As suggested by a teammate, I found out that I'll need to create the template in a different file and then replace the variables in it using some utility. So, again after searching for some packages, I figured that Handlebars would be the best solution for our problem. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • The Features of Front-end UI Components
    In dynamic web pages, especially when using template engines such as Mustache and Handlebars or libraries/frameworks such as React and Vue, the final content structure is basically generated by JS, which strengthens JS and weakens the control of HTML over the content structure. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Make Custom Handlebar Helpers in Ghost!
    In this variable, we have the response from the Ghost instance as the full HTML of the page. Imagine that this response is the homepage of your Ghost instance. The HTML content will also include our plain text {{hello_world}}, which is displayed as plain text. If our custom helper is in this form, we can compile it using Handlebars.js (https://handlebarsjs.com/) in our middleware. Remember to install the library... - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • htmx and ExpressJS
    It is a novel experience to say the least for me. I mean yes I have been using Handlebars, pug, and other templating engines but this is novel in how it changed my perspective about HTML (Just read their motivation in htmx.org). - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
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React mentions (814)

  • Indie Hacking with Open Source Tools: Innovating on a Budget
    One inspiring example is a developer building a "Todoist Clone" using a combination of React, Node.js, and MongoDB. The developer tapped into open source libraries and community support to create a highly responsive task management application. This project underscores how indie hackers can achieve rapid development and adaptation with minimal budget – a theme echoed in several indie hacking success stories. - Source: dev.to / 29 minutes ago
  • Next.js Localization: How to Build a Multilingual Website with Next-Intl
    Next.js is a very popular framework built on top of the React.js library and it provides the best Development Experience for building applications. It offers a bunch of features like:. - Source: dev.to / 13 days ago
  • Web Development Using React Framework
    Explore the official React documentation. - Source: dev.to / 26 days ago
  • Monorepo Tutorial With Lerna, Storybook & Next.js
    We’ll be creating the components package inside the packages directory. In this monorepo package, we’ll be building React components which will be consumed by our Next.js application (front-end package). - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Migrating from AngularJS to React
    After evaluating our options including upgrading from AngularJS to Angular (the name for every version of Angular 2 and beyond) or migrating and rewriting our application in a completely new JavaScript framework: React. We ultimately chose to go with ReactJS. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Handlebars and React, you can also consider the following products

EJS - An open source JavaScript Template library.

Vue.js - Reactive Components for Modern Web Interfaces

Jinja2 - Jinja2 is a template engine written in Python.

Next.js - A small framework for server-rendered universal JavaScript apps

Pug - Pug is a robust, elegant, feature rich template engine for Node.js

Svelte - Cybernetically enhanced web apps