The evaluation always looks rigorous. You put React, Vue and Angular in a spreadsheet, score them on performance, ecosystem, learning curve and community, and one comes out on top by a comfortable margin. Then you build the thing, and two years later the scoring criteria have almost nothing to do with how it's going.
That isn't because the evaluation was wrong. It's because it measured the framework, and what you actually chose was a hiring pool, a set of upgrade obligations and the shape of every technical conversation your team will have for the next five years. We've argued that the front end is where revenue gets decided, and this is the choice that quietly sets the ceiling on it.
Most framework decisions are already made
Be honest about how it usually goes. Someone on the team knows one of them well, or the last agency left a codebase behind, or somebody read something convincing on a Tuesday. The spreadsheet arrives afterwards to confirm it.
That isn't a scandal, it's often the right answer. A framework your team already knows ships sooner and breaks less than the one that scored two points higher. The problem is only when the real reason stays unsaid, because then nobody checks whether it still holds when the team doubles or the original developer moves on.
Vue.js trades some of that ecosystem for a gentler on-ramp, which matters when the people maintaining the app aren't full-time frontend specialists. Angular goes the other way and ships opinions in the box: routing, forms, testing and structure decided for you. Fewer choices later, more to learn on day one.
So what should actually decide it? Three things the spreadsheet tends to leave out, and none of them are about features.
Start with who maintains it in year three. If your team is two developers and a designer who edits templates, an opinionated framework saves you from decisions nobody has time to make well. Then look at rendering before you look at syntax, because whether pages render on the server, in the browser or somewhere in between drives your performance ceiling far more than the library wrapped around it. TypeScript belongs in this conversation too: it's available across all of them now, and adopting it early costs a week while adopting it late costs a quarter. Finally, price the exit. Every framework you pick is one you'll eventually migrate off, and the ones that hold their value are the ones where your business logic sits outside the components rather than inside them. That last part is the difference between a rewrite and a port.
Notice what's missing: benchmark numbers. Every mainstream framework is fast enough that your images, your API response times and your third-party scripts will decide your load time long before the framework does.
The framework you can staff beats the framework that scores higher
Pick for the team you'll have, not the one you have today
At eComia we work across all four, which means we're not selling you the one we happen to know. Whether it lands as a full-stack build or a UI and experience engagement, the framework gets chosen after the team and the timeline, not before.
You'll get further asking who's going to open this codebase on a Monday in 2029 than asking which framework won the benchmark. The answer to the first question usually settles the second.
And if the honest answer is that your team already knows one of them well, that's not a shortcut. That's the strongest signal you have.