htm VS Preact

Compare htm vs Preact and see what are their differences.

htm

Hyperscript Tagged Markup: JSX alternative using standard tagged templates, with compiler support. (by developit)

Preact

⚛️ Fast 3kB React alternative with the same modern API. Components & Virtual DOM. (by preactjs)
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htm Preact
42 111
8,554 36,041
- 0.5%
0.0 9.3
3 months ago 2 days ago
JavaScript JavaScript
Apache License 2.0 MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

htm

Posts with mentions or reviews of htm. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-20.
  • VanJS: A 0.9KB JavaScript UI framework
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Dec 2023
    The preact team also dislikes transpiling jsx so they've developed an alternative using tagged template literals: https://github.com/developit/htm
  • React SSR web-server from scratch
    2 projects | dev.to | 21 Nov 2023
    So getting this to work without bundler magic is very hard. It's not surprising why NextJS is investing in a bundler. Though one thing that really sticks out is how much complexity we add for just miniscule dev ergonomics. Not using JSX and using something like htm would make all this easier (removing the bundler entirely), it's a lot of overhead to avoid a couple of quotes. React should really have a tagged-template mode. Also all of this is indirection is actually bad for dev ergonomics too! One of the reasons I did this is because I'm absolutely sick of magic caches and sorting through code that's been crushed by a bundler into something I don't recognize and can't easily debug. While we can't get rid of this completely (ts/jsx) this preserves the module import graph completely on the client-side making it easy to find things as you are working and preserving line numbers. This obviously is not useful for a production build and there's a lot of work that would need to go in to support both modes over the same code, but it's depressing no tools really work like this for local development.
  • HTML Web Components
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Nov 2023
    You can also do JSX and skip the build step with preact + htm : https://github.com/developit/htm#example
  • Service Worker Templating Language (SWTL)
    4 projects | dev.to | 19 Aug 2023
    While I was able to achieve this fairly easily, the developer experience of manually stitching strings together wasnt great. Being myself a fan of buildless libraries, such as htm and lit-html, I figured I'd try to take a stab at implementing a DSL for component-like templating in Service Workers myself, called Service Worker Templating Language (SWTL), here's what it looks like:
  • Gaseous - Yet Another Games Manager
    3 projects | /r/selfhosted | 10 Jul 2023
    I would however highly recommend https://github.com/developit/htm
  • Create and Hydrate HTML with HTM
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Jun 2023
    I thought the same thing, but apparently "HTM" is a JSX like javascript string template representation of HTML, and it can be found here: https://github.com/developit/htm
  • Anyone using React from just a CDN, barbarian style?
    1 project | /r/reactjs | 28 Feb 2023
    If you're going to do a no-build approach, assume modern JS (so you don't have to transpile the JS syntax). Also, you can use https://github.com/developit/htm as a nearly-identical equivalent to JSX syntax, also without transpiling.
  • Simple Modern JavaScript Using JavaScript Modules and Import Maps
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Feb 2023
    This seems like a case of caring way too much about something that's hardly very different. JSX versus tagged template strings can be incredibly similar to one another.

    The examples in this article are using vanilla template strings to author raw html, but that only misses a couple of nicities JSX has. There are tagged template string libraries like htm[1] that do include some of the few nicities JSX has, but which are actually compatible with the official language.

    [1] https://github.com/developit/htm

  • A few programming language features I’d like to see
    1 project | /r/programming | 19 Jan 2023
    The first one exists in JavaScript and is called Tagged Template Literals. I agree with the author that its a nice feature. It's the perfect construct to use for prepared SQL statements, LINQ-style queries, or reimplementing a JSX-like syntax (see HTM https://github.com/developit/htm).
  • Using React without JSX == no build
    2 projects | dev.to | 4 Jan 2023
    There is however a library that is closer to JSX (HTML-like feel) but yet does not require a build step. htm. HTM uses tagged templates to leverage template literal as native Javascript template strings. If you have not played with tagged templates, I encourage you to check this out, it's a quite powerful feature, that has recently become a part of Javascript.

Preact

Posts with mentions or reviews of Preact. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-23.
  • Preact vs React: A Comparative Guide
    2 projects | dev.to | 23 Apr 2024
    In this post, we get to know more about Preact, one of this year's trending libraries. And we'll compare it to React to see which one suits better for our projects.
  • Episode 24/13: Native Signals, Details on Angular/Wiz, Alan Agius on the Angular CLI
    11 projects | dev.to | 5 Apr 2024
    Similarly to Promises/A+, this effort focuses on aligning the JavaScript ecosystem. If this alignment is successful, then a standard could emerge, based on that experience. Several framework authors are collaborating here on a common model which could back their reactivity core. The current draft is based on design input from the authors/maintainers of Angular, Bubble, Ember, FAST, MobX, Preact, Qwik, RxJS, Solid, Starbeam, Svelte, Vue, Wiz, and more…
  • Proposal: Signals as a Built-In Primitive of JavaScript
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Mar 2024
    Those who want to develop a library that can be used by any other reactive framework. I often see SignalLike type that tries to subtype it.

    https://github.com/preactjs/preact/blob/757746a915d186a90954...

  • Preact: Lightweight React Alternative
    1 project | dev.to | 27 Jan 2024
    The official Preact documentation.
  • How I built a cross-framework frontend library
    3 projects | dev.to | 17 Jan 2024
    At the very bottom of the image, there are 3 blocks that I chose to call application components. If you are building a cross-framework library, these can be built with whatever tools you want! Only catch is, all the tools you use to build it, will be needed by everyone consuming it. So choose wisely, and be mindful of how many kilobytes of third party code you will need in order to ship. In Schedule-X, I chose to use Preact. You will probably be fine with most lightweight virtual DOM libraries, and just like with frameworks there are a few to pick from.
  • React Jam just started, making a game in 13 days with React
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2023
    >> React is not traditionally used for making games, but that's part of the fun and the challenge. R

    > MS Flight Simulator cockpits are built with MSFS Avionics Framework which is React-like and MIT licensed:

    https://github.com/microsoft/msfs-avionics-mirror/tree/main/...

    preactjs may or may not be faster: https://preactjs.com/

    Million.js is faster than preact, and lists a number of references under Acknowledgements: https://github.com/aidenybai/million#acknowledgments

    https://million.dev/docs :

    > We use a novel approach to the virtual DOM called the block virtual DOM. You can read more on what the block virtual DOM is with Virtual DOM: Back in Block and how we make it happen in React with Behind the block().*

    React API reference > Components > Profiler:

  • Have You Built with Preact?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Dec 2023
  • Quando um framework é melhor que a manipulação nativa do DOM
    2 projects | dev.to | 9 Dec 2023
  • HTML Data Attributes: One of the Original State Management Libraries
    5 projects | dev.to | 29 Nov 2023
    DEV is a Rails monolith, which uses Preact in the front-end using islands architecture. The reason why I mention all this is that it's not a full-stack JavaScript application, and there is no state management library like Redux or Zustand in use. The data store, for the most part on the front end, is all data attributes.
  • Show HN: Cami.js – A No Build, Web Component Based Reactive Framework
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Nov 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing htm and Preact you can also consider the following projects:

jsx - The JSX specification is a XML-like syntax extension to ECMAScript.

react-18 - Workgroup for React 18 release.

esbuild-plugin-alias - esbuild plugin for path aliases

Alpine.js - A rugged, minimal framework for composing JavaScript behavior in your markup.

babel-plugin-react-html-attrs - Babel plugin which transforms HTML and SVG attributes on JSX host elements into React-compatible attributes

solid - A declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

vim-jsx-pretty - :flashlight: [Vim script] JSX and TSX syntax pretty highlighting for vim.

lit - Lit is a simple library for building fast, lightweight web components.

Svelte - Cybernetically enhanced web apps

babel-plugin-proposal-pattern-matching - the minimal grammar, high performance JavaScript pattern matching implementation

Vue.js - This is the repo for Vue 2. For Vue 3, go to https://github.com/vuejs/core