Pinia vs Vuex - Why Pinia wins

In the realm of Vue.js, I often come across the dispute between using Vuex and Pinia and why one may be superior to the other. Pinia's position as the recommended state management tool for Vue.js by the official Vue.js website could be one of the reasons why it has gained significant popularity. In this article, I will provide a detailed comparison of Pinia and Vuex outlining their distinctive features, intended usage, advantages, and drawbacks.

Pinia

Pinia is a relatively newer state management library that allows you to manage reactive state across your Vue.js components. It is also the currently recommended global state management tool. Eduardo San Martin Morote, a member of the Vue core team, designed Pinia. Pinia builds an easy and properly typed state management system using the new reactivity mechanism and is an excellent library for managing the reactive state of your application. When compared to Vuex, the Pinia API is significantly easier to learn and makes your code a lot easier to read.

Structure

How does it work? Creating a store is as simple as this!

import { defineStore } from 'pinia'

export const useCounterStore = defineStore('counter', {
  state: () => {
    return { count: 0 }
  },
  getters: {
    doubleCount: (state) => state.count * 2,
  },
  actions: {
    increment() {
      this.count++
    },
  },
})

Why you might want to use Pinia (Features)

Devtools support

Pinia provides excellent support for Vue devtools, which allows developers to easily debug and monitor the state and mutations of their application.

Hot module replacement

With hot module replacement, developers can make changes to their code, and the changes will be immediately reflected in the running application, improving the development workflow and reducing development time. Without Pinia, global state can be destroyed and reset during HMR but Pinia preserves it

Plugins

Pinia stores can be fully extended thanks to a low level API. With plugins you can perform tasks like localStorage synchronization, ORM (Object-Relational Mapping), add options when defining stores and so much more you can leverage when the default behavior of Pinia is not sufficient for your needs. There are available plugins you can start using or create one for your own need.

Proper TypeScript support or autocompletion for JS users

Pinia provides robust support for TypeScript, including a powerful auto-complete feature for JavaScript, which significantly simplifies the development process. With this feature, developers can quickly write code and avoid common errors, improving the quality of their code and reducing development time.

Server Side Rendering Support

Pinia offers support for server-side rendering (SSR), which enables developers to use Pinia in SSR Vue.js frameworks, such as Nuxt.

Vuex

Vuex is a state management pattern + library for Vue.js applications that acts as a centralized store for all the components in an application, with rules guaranteeing that the state may only be altered in a predictable manner.

Structure

This is what a store looks like in Vuex.

import { createStore } from 'vuex'

const counterstore = createStore({
  state() {
    return {
      todoListItems: []
    }
  },
getters: {
    countList (state) {
      return state.todoListItems.length()
    }
  actions: {
    addNewToList({ commit }, item) {
    {
      commit('createNewItem', item)
    }
  },
  mutations: {
    createNewItem(state, item) {
      state.todoListItems.push(item)
    }
  }
})

Why you may want to use Vuex (Features)

Modules

By utilizing the Vuex module, you can separate your store into several files based on the domain function, which allows you to access the state cycles from the module in that specific namespace. As your application increases in size, this becomes a useful strategy to avoid making it harder to use.

HMR Support

Vuex also supports the hot reload function, which leverages the hot module replacement API of webpack to quickly reload your mutations, modules, actions, and getters as you continue to develop your code.

Devtools support

You can also utilize the Vuex tab in the Vue devtools to conveniently access and debug our mutations, as well as view the state, providing us with an easy way to keep track of the state of our application.

What make Pinia different and better?

Pinia offers several advantages over other solutions, including Vuex;

Intuitive Design

With Pinia, creating and organizing your stores is made simple and easy through its straightforward API, similar to creating a component. This approach results in less need for boilerplate code and a reduced number of concepts to learn compared to the Vuex solution. You don’t have to remember: “Is it commit or dispatch 🤔” or use magic strings to call actions For example: dispatch(’doTheThing’). This also provides other developers an easier and better way to understand your stores.

Mutations no longer exist.

No need to think about creating rules to update your state. Update them directly. Such a big relief

Better TypeScript Support

No need to create custom complex wrappers to support TypeScript, everything is typed and the API is designed in a way to leverage TS type inference as much as possible.

Autocompletion

JS autocomplete feature to write your code better. No more magic strings to inject, import the functions, call them.

Better module structure

No more nested structuring of modules. You can still nest stores implicitly by importing and using a store inside another but Pinia offers a flat structuring by design while still enabling ways of cross composition among stores.

Lightweight

Pinia weighs only 1 KB, making it very easy to incorporate into your project. This may improve your application performance.****

Which should i use going forward?

Looking at these two state management libraries, we can see that they each have their advantages, however Pinia has a clear advantage over Vuex. Pinia has been designated as the recommended state management library, making it the clear choice for constructing your Vue.js application.

If you already have stores operating on Vuex, don't worry, it's not going away anytime soon. However, if you are considering migrating your Vuex stores to Pinia, you should absolutely read this article.

Definitely a useful piece of information and i hope you enjoyed reading about it. If you want a more detailed explanation, I suggest reading the Vuex documentation and the Pinia documentation or if your looking to exploring both libraries then absolutely checkout the Vuex For Everyone and Pinia: The Enjoyable Vue Store courses from Vue School to get a comprehensive tutorial on using these technologies.