Welcome to the 9th edition of JavaScript Rising Stars, your guide to the top trends and projects shaping the JS ecosystem in 2024.
Table of Contents
shadcn/ui
Trends in 2024
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Excalidraw
Trends in 2024
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AFFiNE
Trends in 2024
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Bruno
Trends in 2024
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n8n
Trends in 2024
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htmx
Trends in 2024
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Tauri
Trends in 2024
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Supabase
Trends in 2024
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Flowise
Trends in 2024
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Payload
Trends in 2024
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htmx
Trends in 2024
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React
Trends in 2024
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Svelte
Trends in 2024
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Vue.js
Trends in 2024
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Angular
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At number two in 2023, htmx reached the top of the frontend framework category in 2024.
It can be considered an extension of the HTML language (hence its name) and is often regarded as a library rather than a framework. However, the boundary is blurry. Check out this article explaining why htmx is another framework.
It’s a great choice if you need to enhance a static site with interactivity or if your application’s state is "server-driven." By using only a combination of HTML hx-*
attributes, you can implement features like data fetching without writing a single line of JavaScript.
Want to see it in action? This "Rising Stars" site is built with Astro, and htmx powers features such as the lazy loading of extra categories when you scroll down.
At 2, React keeps reinventing itself, which is part of its success. It took more than three years to release version 19, but it finally launched in December after back-and-forth changes related to the Suspense API. Check out the React 19 cheatsheet for more details.
Among the new features, the support of web components ("Custom Elements") is great news. Speaking of web components, Ryan Carnato, the creator of Solid (number 8) wrote why Web Components Are Not the Future, creating some controversy. An interesting response came from Lea Vera in this post concluding we should use "whatever tools we find most productive".
At 3, Svelte also had a major release with version 5. The standout change is the introduction of "runes," an explicit mechanism for declaring reactive state. It's worth mentioning that Svelte has the highest positive opinion in the State of JS results.
shadcn/ui
Trends in 2024
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Excalidraw
Trends in 2024
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Next.js
Trends in 2024
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Refine
Trends in 2024
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react-scan
Trends in 2024
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Guest Writer: Robin Wieruch
Freelance Full-Stack Developer and author of The Road to React and The Road to Next.
2024 saw React paradoxically become both more opinionated and less opinionated.
On one hand, React has grown more opinionated with the introduction of Server Components and Server Functions, steering developers toward architectures that operate across the wire. On the other hand, it has become less opinionated as these new primitives are being adopted and abstracted by several frameworks, each taking its own approach.
React is no longer just a library. It is evolving into a specification for frameworks, representing a significant shift in the ecosystem toward a framework-first mindset. However, it still allows developers to opt-out of this mindset and stay closer to the client if they prefer.
During all this transformation, React remains committed to refining its core. The ongoing development of the React Compiler focuses on improving both performance and the developer experience. With the release of React 19, support for custom elements has been introduced, along with new hooks and form actions that redefine how forms are managed in React.
I'm now excited by the possibilities React 19 unlocks. React is becoming a full-stack framework, and it's fascinating to see how this will shape the future of web development with all the players in the React ecosystem.
Nuxt
Trends in 2024
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PrimeVue
Trends in 2024
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Slidev
Trends in 2024
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shadcn-vue
Trends in 2024
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VitePress
Trends in 2024
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Guest Writer Daniel Roe
Daniel leads the Nuxt core team. He's a full-time open source contributor, speaker, and consultant.
This year has been a good one in the Vue ecosystem. Vue itself has seen a much more active release cycle from the core team, with new minors delivering regular performance improvements. For example, the the reactivity system was reworked in v3.5, with another change to use the new, lighter, alien-signals approach already landing in the main branch .
One of the most marked signs of the ecosystem's confidence can be seen in its UI libraries. They are flourishing. Of course, part of what's enabling this is Tailwind CSS. Its convention-based approach to writing CSS and cross-framework capability means that UI libraries like shadcn-vue or Radix Vue (soon to be Reka UI ) could be straightforwardly ported from their React equivalents. Equally, Vue-native libraries like Element Plus and Naive UI continue to thrive, with dedicated user bases and consistent growth.
However, the best result of all UI libraries has come from PrimeVue , which can integrate with Tailwind CSS but doesn't require it. PrimeVue made it into the 2nd place spot with a whopping 5.4k stars. They have seen sustained development this year, and have ambitions in the React and Angular ecosystems as well - good news for the Primefaces ecosystem as a whole.
We also see a number of frameworks like Nuxt, Slidev, VitePress and Vue Element Admin which are doing very well indeed.
Slidev offers an incredible, interactive experience for developing slides, with significant improvements rolled out this year including Twoslash improvements and Magic Move support.
VitePress continues to be a case-study in generating static sites built with Vue, and offers rock-solid performance and a great developer experience. It remains the go-to for documentation websites in the Vue ecosystem and beyond, but can be used much more broadly.
Nuxt tops the list. As the most used meta-framework in the Vue space, a big part of this year's work has been solidifying the changes made in Nuxt 3, and preparations for a smooth transition to the next Nuxt major in v4. But we've also seen the release of new core modules like Nuxt Fonts (zero config optimised web fonts) and Nuxt Scripts (performant third-party script loading), and development on nuxt-auth-utils, which is being developed into a core Nuxt auth solution.
For all of the libraries we see on the list, developer experience remains a top priority and the next year promises some pretty exciting things for Vue developers, like Vapor mode (at last), stabilised Suspense in Vue 3.6, a next Nuxt major release - and more.
Next.js
Trends in 2024
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Hono
Trends in 2024
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Astro
Trends in 2024
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Nest
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Strapi
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For the 4th consecutive year, Next.js remains the most popular full-stack framework. The version 15 release supports React 19 and brings performance improvements, leveraging the new Cache API, as well as enhanced developer experience (DX) thanks to the full adoption of Turbopack as the build tool.
The newcomer in the category is the web server Hono, taking the second spot. It can be seen as a modern replacement for Express (ranked 15th despite being 15 years old!) and is capable of running in multiple JavaScript runtimes: Node.js, of course, but also Deno, Bun, and serverless environments like Lambda or Cloudflare Workers. It stands out for its incredibly small footprint. Read the story from its creator.
At 3, Astro has become a versatile solution for building content-heavy applications. The version 5 release introduced a new Content Layer, enabling type-safe data fetching from any source—whether it’s from the file system or external APIs.
I’ve used Astro to build this site, and I’m impressed by the DX (the CLI that calls you an astronaut is so cute!) and the exceptional web performance it delivers.
Biome
Trends in 2024
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Bun
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Vite
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Oxc
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Rspack
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Guest Writer: Sébastien Lorber
Sébastien runs This Week in React, keeping 45k+ React devs up to date.
He’s also the lead maintainer of Docusaurus, working for Meta Open Source
2024 is another great year for JS tooling, with ongoing work to innovate and improve performance. Many projects have matured and gained momentum, while other super exciting projects are still being developed.
Vite has been the big winner again this year, renewing for the second time its State of JS awards as the most adopted and loved technology. It's rare to have both high usage and retention, let alone maintain it. We are eagerly waiting to see how the new void(0) company will impact the Vite ecosystem next year!
It’s worth mentioning that the most successful tools are making themselves easy to adopt:
- Rspack is an almost drop-in alternative to webpack that started to gain traction, successfully adopted by Docusaurus and Nuxt. It should explode in 2025, given its ease of adoption and the number of existing webpack projects that could build faster.
- Bun is an all-in-one JS toolchain, also designed to facilitate adoption thanks to its compatibility with Node.js, npm, or Jest. It continued its ongoing compatibility work in 2024, notably shipping Windows support and text-based lockfile.
- Rolldown is a fast bundler with a Rollup-compatible API and esbuild feature parity. It’s still in active development but progressing fast and recently published the first v1.0 beta. One of the most eagerly awaited projects, set to power Vite in 2025.
- Turbopack is an incremental bundler that initially focuses on being an implementation detail of Next.js, that you can turn on with a simple CLI
--turbo
flag. Turbopack Dev is considered stable, and Turbopack Prod is being actively worked on. A standalone version of Turbopack is planned in the future. - Biome, a faster alternative to Prettier (with 97%+ compatibility) and ESLint, has been widely and positively adopted by the community.
On the TypeScript side, it’s also worth mentioning:
- TypeScript 5.5 shipped Isolated Declarations, unlocking improved build parallelization
- Node.js now supports TypeScript by default and can run
.ts
files directly. It’s coming in the very next v23.6 release and should be backported in v22. Both Bun and Deno already had support.
Expo
Trends in 2024
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React Native
Trends in 2024
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React Native Reusables
Trends in 2024
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React Strict DOM
Trends in 2024
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Tamagui
Trends in 2024
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Guest Writer: Evan Bacon
Lead of Developer Tools at Expo. Native iOS and Android developer. Author of Config Plugins and Expo CLI.
In 2024, React Native continues to dominate the mobile app space, maintaining its status as the most popular framework for building cross-platform applications. Expo, for the second consecutive year, remains the top-ranked project, growing substantially since 2023.
One of the biggest trends this year is the growing emphasis on web/universal support in React Native. Expo Router has made substantial progress in bridging the web-native gap, introducing Expo DOM components ('use dom') to enable incremental migration between React web and universal React. This can also be observed in Meta's shift away from React Native for Web towards the more web-focused React Strict DOM and Stylex which they're using internally. Further the majority of the top trending projects are focused on web/native unification.
Styling is still a key focus in the ecosystem. This can especially be observed with Yoga v3 (React Native styling engine) which has brought a number of enhancements to built-in React Native styles, primarily driven by Meta's work on first-party apps like Instagram and Facebook for Quest (built with React Android). Meanwhile, community-driven solutions continue to thrive, with multiple approaches and opinions all generally bringing the best parts of the web over to native.
Looking ahead, I expect AI to play an even larger role in native development tooling and application experiences. Expo Router's early preview of universal React Server Components will likely inspire new composable server libraries to emerge. Additionally, native UIs will likely evolve even further, with more bindings into SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose, overall widening the 'pit of success'.
I also predict that the native community will grow even larger with the introduction of Expo DOM components and continued improvements to single-command app deployment tools like (EAS Build), making it a much more familiar and exciting space for all developers.
2025 will definitely be an exciting year!
Zustand
Trends in 2024
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Jotai
Trends in 2024
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XState
Trends in 2024
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Pinia
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Nano stores
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Guest Writer: Jack Herrington
Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
Zustand continues its meteoric rise as the go-to state management library for React, as well as React Native and beyond. Zustand is the "bare bones" state management library and it's clear that folks are thirsty for that.
If we look at the results by the style of state management some interesting patterns emerge. Zustand, Pinia and Redux, and Boardgame are unidirectional and you define your state and the actions that change it. With Jotai, Nano stores, and Legend-State you define your state as atoms and create computed atoms that depend on other atoms. Valtio is a bi-directional state management library. And X-State is a state machine library.
A conclusion we can draw from these results is that formal Redux style state management (though not the Redux library itself) continues to be the most popular style of state management. While the atomic model is making great strides as well (Recoil, the original atomic library, is just off this top ten).
XState cannot be overlooked though. When it comes to complex applications, state machines are a fantastic choice because they model your application into a strict series of states and transitions between states. If you haven't tried it yet the interactive editor and simulator for X-State is a must see.
Boardgame and TinyBase are very interesting additions on the top ten. Boardgame is specifically geared towards building games. And Tinybase is geared round local first data storage and syncing that data with backend services. Both of these libraries are highly verticalized, which could indicate a trend. Problems like syncing local first data with backend services is a complex problem, so having libraries (like Tinybase and Legend State) that focus specifically on that is a good thing.
One thing I don't see on this list is signals. I'm not sure if that's because folks are waiting on the TC39 proposal to be finalized and widely adopted, or because it's baked into frameworks like Solid, Svelte, and Qwik. Signals might not have made the top ten, but they are still an outstanding way to model state efficiently.
The next few years are lining up to be an exciting time in state management for React, Vue, JavaScript and beyond.
Overall winner: shadcn/ui did it again 🏆
As in 2023, shadcn-ui is the hottest project of the year. It found a perfect balance between robust foundations (provided by headless component libraries such as radix) and customization possibilities.
The idea of letting developers own the code of their components, instead of providing components you have to
import
, was really a game changer.A lot of features were added in 2024:
The new CLI is much more powerful and flexible:
shadcn add
can now install components, themes, hooks, utils, dependencies, etc.Another reason for its success is the tight integration with the service v0 that can generate components built on top of shadcn/ui.
It's also a great learning resource to show how to create composable components that are easy to extend, as components are right in your source folder.
Number 2: Excalidraw
Excalidraw is an open-source online tool designed for creating digital drawings and visualizations with a distinctive hand-drawn style that makes it the perfect tool to brainstorm ideas or explain concepts and workflows.
AI features include: Text to Diagram, Mermaid to Excalidraw, and Wireframe to Code.
Number 3: AFFiNE
AFFiNE is an open-source knowledge base and project management tool that combines the capabilities of tools like Notion (with documents made of blocks) and Miro (infinite canvas for drawing).
Being offline-first, it's a great tool to build one's Personal Knowledge Base.
Special mentions
If you want to see what a browser is capable of, check out: