4 Reasons Why You Should Prefer Vite Over Create-React-App (CRA)

Create React App (CRA) has been a popular choice for developers to set up React projects, but as project sizes grow, its reliance on webpack can lead to slower development and build times, affecting productivity. In contrast, Vite is emerging as a next-generation front-end tool that enhances speed and performance by building applications on demand and leveraging native ES modules, esbuild, and Rollup. Vite's development server supports fast Hot Module Replacement (HMR) and pre-bundling while its build command optimizes code bundling for production. It offers faster development server spin-up times, quicker file update reflections, and improved build performance through features like async chunk loading optimization and CSS code splitting. Vite supports TypeScript, JSX, CSS, and more, and can significantly reduce build times compared to CRA. While some users remain cautious due to CRA's established ecosystem, Vite's rapid growth and adoption by companies like Replit, Cypress, and Tailwind Labs highlight its potential as a robust alternative for modern web development.