Welcome to the 10th edition of JavaScript Rising Stars!
What a year it has been! From the explosion of AI agents transforming how we build applications to critical vulnerabilities and security attacks that shook the ecosystem, 2025 has been a year of both remarkable innovation and sobering challenges.
React regained its crown from htmx, which had topped the category in 2024.
Debates about React's age and whether alternatives like Solid or Svelte are better for new projects are complicated by LLMs being trained on React codebases, making it harder for alternatives to gain traction. See how React won by default.
React 19 introduced significant improvements, including the Activity API and enhanced hooks for managing user events.
Speaking of effects, an outage occurred when Cloudflare DDoS'd themselves because of a useEffect making infinite calls to their API from their dashboards.
React's shift to the server with React Server Components marks the biggest change in recent years, but it comes with great power and risks, as seen with critical vulnerabilities like React2Shell, a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in React Server Components that required urgent patch releases. (December 3, 2025, December 11, 2025) At #2, Ripple is the newcomer in the TOP 5. It's a brand new UI framework that combines the best of React, Solid, and Svelte. It has reactive primitives, a component-based architecture, and a template syntax.
Currently in early development. React has Next.js, Vue.js has Nuxt, Svelte has SvelteKit, Solid has SolidStart... will Ripple have its own meta framework to handle server-side rendering?
Svelte is at #3 for the third year in a row. Svelte 5’s Runes reactivity system ($state, $derived, $effect) became the standard way to model state.
Freelance Full-Stack Developer and author of The Road to React and The Road to Next.
In 2025, the React ecosystem reached a visible inflection point around a long-building tension: increasingly powerful server-side capabilities versus the desire to keep client-side development simple and predictable. Spearheaded largely by Next.js, React's push toward Server Components, server functions, and streaming unlocked new performance and architectural possibilities. At the same time, this shift introduced a new mental model, where understanding client–server boundaries, data lifecycles, and rendering phases became essential to day-to-day development.
The community response was division. Some embraced the new server-first direction as the natural evolution of React, while others questioned whether the added complexity was justified for everyday UI work. Security incidents around server functions and request boundaries further sharpened this debate. They exposed the risk introduced by highly abstracted full-stack patterns, but they also signaled something else: React's server-side model had reached a level of real-world adoption where assumptions were being stress-tested, audited, and challenged in production.
Against this backdrop, TanStack Start gained attention by approaching React's new capabilities from a more client-centric (and isomorphic) perspective, prioritizing clarity, type-safety, and explicit control. This naturally shifts the conversation toward frameworks, not as feature races, but as competing philosophies about how much abstraction developers should accept and where complexity truly belongs.
I'm excited about where this tension will lead the React ecosystem next. While I've been building with server-side React in Next.js for over two years, I'm equally curious to explore TanStack Start and what its perspective brings to the table
Daniel leads the Nuxt core team. He's a full-time open source contributor, speaker, and consultant.
Coming soon!
A newcomer wins the backend/fullstack category! Motia represents a paradigm shift in backend engineering, unifying what traditionally required multiple separate frameworks into a single system. Instead of juggling different tools for APIs, background jobs, queues, workflows, streams, and AI agents, Motia provides one framework for your entire backend.
At its core, Motia uses a primitive called Steps, a single abstraction that defines how code runs, when it runs, where it runs, and what it does. Each Step has a config (defining triggers, paths, schedules) and a handler (your business logic). Change the Step type, and the same pattern works for different use cases: API endpoints, event handlers, or cron jobs.
Steps can be written in TypeScript or Python. It also comes with built-in observability through the Workbench, a visual control panel to manage, debug, and observe runs, plus built-in state management and streaming capabilities.
The next four projects are the same as in 2024, besides Hono and Astro swapping positions.
Payload, number one last year, is an hybrid between headless CMS and admin panel for Next.js. The biggest news is the acquisition by Figma, the ultimate goal being to lower the gap between design and code.
At #3, Next.js 16 introduced the cached components to make caching more explicit and flexible. Developers can create static page shells that include dynamic content streaming from the server.
At #4, Astro keeps shining as a versatile framework to build content-heavy applications (like your beloved JS Rising Stars!) with a great developer experience and a focus on performance.
At #5, Hono became a standard for modern web servers (even if Express is still a thing!), thanks to its lightweight core that runs anywhere (Node.js runtimes, Cloudflare workers...) and a rich eco-system of handlers and middlewares. Read about the story of Hono.
The biggest change in the category of the meta frameworks is the rise of Tanstack Start, as one of the best alternatives to Next.js if you want to build a full-stack application on top of React.
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
Bun’s consistent effort paid off, leading the all-in-one JavaScript toolkit to the top spot. Throughout the year, it kept improving performance, Node.js compatibility, and delivering many new useful features, making it a great platform for full-stack JavaScript development. The year closed with Bun being acquired by Anthropic, we’re eager to see what 2026 brings for the project.
This year was also important for void(0). The company announced in late 2024 is behind a new generation of frontend infrastructure tooling (Oxc, Rolldown) and already gave us a glimpse of the future. Its flagship project Vite continued to improve throughout the year, stabilizing the new Environment API, and making it possible to use the new Rust-based bundler Rolldown. The project even received its own documentary. Vitest also released one of its most anticipated features: Browser Mode. New exciting projects are emerging from the Oxc ecosystem as very compelling alternatives to existing tools: Oxlint could become the new ESLint, and Oxfmt the new Prettier. The company ended the year by raising a new Series A and announcing Vite+, its first commercial offering.
It’s also worth mentioning Rspack. This Rust-based bundler from ByteDance is a faster, drop-in alternative to webpack, so it’s no surprise to see it being widely adopted this year. The broader Rstack ecosystem is worth watching, spawning new tools like Rstest and Rslint.
Next.js recently switched to Turbopack as the new default bundler, bringing major speed gains over its former bundler webpack. Note that it’s also possible to build Next.js apps with Rspack.
Although not yet ready for prime time, one of the most important announcements of the year is Microsoft rewriting TypeScript in Go, making it significantly faster. The team has recently shared progress, and the native TypeScript experience already looks ready for early adopters. TypeScript 6.0 will be the last JavaScript-based release, serving as a bridge to TypeScript 7.0—the Go rewrite. In 2025, modern infrastructure tools increasingly originated from large or VC-backed companies, raising an important question: can established, community-driven projects stay competitive in the year ahead?
Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
2025 Was the Year of the Workflow and 2026 Will Be the Year You Can't Ignore It
The chatbot era is over. The tools surging in developer mindshare aren't chatbot libraries or prompt playgrounds, they're workflow engines. n8n's is blowing the doors off the charts with an +112k star jump in 2025. Which is not surprising, n8n is becoming the go-to tool for connecting frontier models to tools created to build those agents. Dyad, Flowise, Mastra, Stagehand, is a whose who of automation and agentic workflows. Vercel is still the go to for folks who want to take control of the chat and the agentic flow at the base level (but they are also adding agents). TanStack AI is the new kid on the block, but they are making waves with their agentic capabilities.
So here's your 2026 homework: stop asking "how do I get better responses from my LLM" and start asking "what workflows can I hand off entirely to AI?" Pick up n8n or Flowise and build something that triggers on an event, reasons through options, and takes action without asking permission. Wire up a Mastra agent that coordinates across multiple tools and platforms. Experiment with Stagehand to automate browser tasks.
Chatbot's were just the training wheels. Time to take them off.
Oh, also, pay attention to the dark horse of "code mode". It could be the biggest thing in this space since MCP.
Cross-platform app developer working to bring web and native technologies closer together
For the first time in the decade-long history of JavaScript Rising Stars, neither React Native nor its primary meta-framework, Expo, are to be found at the top of the Mobile section. Instead, both have been supplanted by two newcomers, Valdi and Lynx – the respective in-house frameworks of Snap (the company behind Snapchat) and ByteDance (the company behind Tiktok).
Valdi and Lynx will not look alien to React Native developers. They are both web-inspired, rendering native views yet supporting TypeScript, JSX, flexbox layout, hot reload, and CSS. Valdi components look reminiscent of React class components, while Lynx supports both an imperative API and a full-blown React abstraction (which it recommends by default).
Where they distinguish themselves is in the business requirements that they optimise for. Valdi was designed to be lightweight, lazy-loaded, and scalable, to enable opt-in adoption on a screen-by-screen basis without significant performance cost. Lynx was designed to afford rich interactivity, employing a dual-thread architecture to offer a web-like abstraction without bottlenecking on a single thread.
But they're not the only newcomers to dethrone React Native. Dioxus, in fourth place, is an ambitious framework, which aims to deliver a "better Flutter" based on web technologies, but without the weight of a fully-featured web view. While for now it does default to using system web views, the long-term goal is to stabilise Blitz, their lightweight web renderer that draws using native graphics APIs (e.g. Vulcan and Metal) via wgpu. At present, Dioxus apps are scripted exclusively in Rust, but there are plans to support more languages in future.
On to the incumbents, which need no introduction. React Native shows another stellar performance for the year, with increased strides towards the long-awaited version 1. It improved web conformance in 0.77; it introduced support for React 19 in version 0.78; it began moving towards a stable JavaScript API and strict TypeScript API from 0.80; it introduced prebuilt iOS binaries (paving the way to migrate from CocoaPods to Swift Package Manager) in 0.81; it dropped Old Architecture and added opt-in support for Hermes V1 in 0.82; and it shipped the first ever non-breaking release in 0.83. With such inexorable velocity, and the long-term assurances brought by the formation of the React Foundation this year, React Native continues to be a sure bet in any cross-platform tech stack.
One of the biggest news of the year is the acquisition of Bun by Anthropic, the company behind Claude Code and the Claude family of LLMs.
Bun the one-in-all Javascript runtime was our champion in 2022. It's interesting to see how the sudden rise of LLMs caused the shift of the vision from building a cloud product (similar to what Deno offers with Deno Deploy) to powering AI agents.
AI coding tools are getting really good, really fast and they're using Bun's single-file executables to ship CLIs and agents that run everywhere.
Another news that matters for the JS community: Lee Robinson who was the face of Next.js for years (and our Guest Writer in 2020!) joined Cursor, providing educational content about AI to developers; see his Learning course, excellent for beginners.
Speaking of familiar faces in the Open-source community, Anthony Fu (Vite, Vitest and so many projects!), Daniel Roe and Sébastien Chopin (Nuxt) joined Vercel, it looks like a good sign for the diversity of the frameworks considering the company is known for its focus on Next.js and React.
The announcement of Remix 3 was a bold move as Remix creators (also the creators of React Router) decided to ditch React, betting more than ever on the web platform. It does not mean Remix users will lose their favorite framework, Remix 2 has morphed into React Router framework.
An interesting inside article about how React and Remix Choose Different Futures.
React is following a path of stability, even if it means sacrificing complexity, while Remix is choosing simplicity as their primary goal.
The official release of Remix 3 will be a highlight of 2026, for sure.
Speaking of React, the directive pattern caused some controversy this year. Directive pattern started with use strict a long time ago, way before React was born and the topic became hot recently.
use client to tell the compiler a component is client-side only.use server exposes functions as HTTP end-points called Server Actionsuse cache, introduced by Next.js 16, sets up caching at the page, component or function leveluse workflow and use step that have an impact in the infra layer, allowing the creation of powerful async workflows that can run for long periods of time.These directives rely on build-time conventions and not explicit runtime contracts, generating interesting discussions about the future of the language that is now 30 years old! Read about Directives and the Platform Boundary from Tanner Linsley (the man behind the TanStack!)
2025 was not all sunshine and innovation. We have already mentioned the React2Shell vulnerability found at the end of the year, but the whole npm ecosystem was under attack with the "Shai-Hulud" supply chain attack, a sophisticated campaign that compromised thousands of npm packages and GitHub repositories. This attack highlighted the fragility of our dependency ecosystem and the critical need for better security practices, dependency auditing, and supply chain protection.
What to expect in 2026? Mastering agent workflows seems to be a must-have skill for developers, in the same time we don't want to surrender all control to AI and compromise with quality and clean code. Finding the right balance will be the key!
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Overall winner: n8n 🏆
n8n is the absolute winner of the 2025 rankings, and the numbers are insane: +112,000 stars in a single year. No project has received that amount of stars in a single year since we started running the Rising Stars.
n8n is a fair-code workflow automation platform with native AI capabilities that allows you to connect various apps and services through visual workflows. Its success reflects the growing need for no-code automation tools, now enhanced with AI integrations to support emerging agent-based workflows.
In the workflow automation space, you may be interested in the following two projects created in 2025:
Three other projects related to AI make the TOP 10:
Number 2: shadcn-ui
At #2, shadcn/ui, our champion of 2023 and 2024, keeps its tremendous momentum.
If you have checked our previous editions, you already know it's a set of consistent React components crafted with taste and great attention to details (accessibility, keyboard interactions, etc.), gathering the best of headless components such as Radix UI, TanStack Table...
It's also a registry that has made a new mode of distributing components possible. A lot of projects define themselves as "shadcn/ui" projects, and about 100 projects are listed in the official Registry Directory.
The most amazing feature of shadcn/ui is that it found the sweet spot between functionality available out of the box and customizability.
Beyond the newly added components, shadcn/ui is no longer tightly coupled to Radix UI and now supports Base UI (number 4 in the component libraries rankings)
There was a criticism that sites built with it tend to look similar; however, the ability to customize the look-and-feel has improved a lot with the introduction of new styles and a new create page to build your own custom theme.
Number 3: react-bits
React Bits is a collection of fancy animated components (background effects, text animations, cards...) for React, perfect for building memorable websites.
Interestingly, it's distributed as a shadcn/ui project, available from the shadcn/ui registry using the command line or via good old copy-paste in your codebase. Some of the components require a dependency: either GSAP or motion.
The documentation comes with a Background Studio that lets you adjust and customize the setup of all components (colors, speed, number of particles...) and export as a snippet you can copy-paste in your codebase.
Also available as a Vue version: Vue Bits.
Special Pick
At number 7, Better Auth is a great solution to handle authentication in your application using your own infrastructure. It comes with a system of plugins to address the most common needs: magic links, one-time passwords, multi-tenant architecture to support organizations with members and roles, and many more.
It's framework-agnostic and can be used with any framework, but it comes with great integrations for all major fullstack frameworks.