What Web Development Trends Will Shape 2021? Insights from 2020 Survey

In web development, the landscape changes rapidly, but can we understand the 2021 web trends? By examining data from the 2020 developer survey, several interesting findings emerge.

Package Managers

Last year I highlighted the rise of PNPM, which aims to avoid version conflicts and attracted enthusiastic supporters, reaching 9.5k stars on GitHub. However, I doubt PNPM will seriously compete on usage in 2021 because Yarn and NPM are deeply embedded in real‑time projects, and both receive significant effort for new features, some of which are directly targeted at PNPM, especially Workspaces. This illustrates how competition drives open‑source progress.

Testing

In 2019, Cypress and Puppeteer stood out, and they continued to succeed in 2020. Microsoft then introduced a new E2E testing tool, Playwright, which seemed to appear suddenly and earned just under 20k stars in 2020. Its popularity stems from Microsoft’s open‑source influence, its feature set, and an easy migration path from Puppeteer.

Frameworks

Vue was the most popular framework in 2019, a clear signal that developers favored it, and the trend continued in 2020. However, based on NPM download numbers, React still holds a massive market share.

We also cannot ignore Svelte and Angular. Angular remains very popular—gaining 13.3k new stars last year and nearly 2.5 million weekly downloads on NPM. Given React’s dominance, this may surprise some, but the data is solid. In contrast, Svelte is very young but ranks high on JavaScript satisfaction surveys.

Backend

Express still leads with 51.5k stars, while Nest exploded in 2020, adding 10.3k new stars to reach a total of 33.6k. Developers favor Nest because it speeds up development and simplifies maintenance.

Build Tools

This area shows notable competition. Despite complaints about Webpack’s developer experience, it has long been the dominant tool and remains the most widely used. Last year we saw Rome challenging this space, and this year esbuild, Snowpack, and Vite have emerged as rising stars. Esbuild’s sole purpose is to accelerate build times, a value many engineering teams appreciate, explaining its rapid adoption.

While GitHub stars are a metric, the State of JS survey shows Snowpack topping the interest list and sharing the top spot on the satisfaction list. Although its usage may still be low, its era seems imminent. The popularity of Snowpack and Vite signals that native ES modules are being taken seriously by the community, a huge topic affecting build processes, caching, and symmetry between development and production modules.

Conclusion

After years of divergent patterns, frameworks, and libraries, we feel practices are converging. This trend will likely continue in 2021, and it’s clear that JavaScript’s popularity has spurred a surge of tools that were once exclusive to other languages; the rise of more E2E testing and machine‑learning tools illustrates this.

Driven by rapid advances in features, browser support, and runtimes, JavaScript’s landscape will keep expanding.