What Will Shape Web Development in 2021? Insights from the 2020 Survey

In web development, the landscape changes rapidly; can we grasp the 2021 trends by analyzing 2020 developer survey data? Let's dive into the findings.

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 its usage will seriously compete in 2021 because Yarn and NPM remain deeply embedded in projects and receive more feature investment, including workspace features that even target PNPM.

Testing

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

Frameworks

Vue was the most popular framework in 2019, sending a clear signal that developers love it, and the trend continued in 2020. Yet React still dominates market share when looking at NPM download numbers.

Angular remains very popular—gaining 13.3k new stars last year with nearly 2.5 million weekly downloads on NPM. Despite React’s dominance, these numbers are noteworthy. Svelte, though young, ranks high on developer satisfaction.

Backend

Express stays on top with 51.5k stars. Nest.js exploded in 2020, adding 10.3k new stars to reach 33.6k, praised for speeding development and simplifying maintenance.

Build Tools

The build‑tool arena is competitive. Webpack, despite some DevX complaints, remains the long‑time leader and most widely used. Rome emerged as a challenger last year, and this year esbuild, Snowpack, and Vite appear as rising stars. Esbuild focuses on speeding up build times, a valuable benefit for many teams.

Although GitHub stars are a metric, Snowpack topped the interest list in the State of JS survey and shares the top spot on the satisfaction list. Even with low usage, its era seems imminent. The popularity of Snowpack and Vite signals that native ES modules are being taken seriously, affecting build processes, caching, and module symmetry between development and production.

Conclusion

After years of divergent patterns, frameworks, and libraries, practices appear to be converging. This trend will likely continue into 2021, as JavaScript’s popularity fuels an explosion of tools that were once language‑specific; the rise of E2E testing and machine‑learning tools illustrates this.

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