Vue.js State Management: Pinia vs. Vuex

Vuex and Pinia are standard Vue.js libraries for managing your Vue.js app’s state. Let’s compare their code, languages, features and community support.

Managing your application’s state as a developer can be challenging without the proper library. Vuex and Pinia are standard Vue.js libraries for handling conditions in your application. Both libraries are excellent for state management, but choosing which one to utilize for your project takes time and is frustrating because of their outstanding features and functionalities. Well, we will look at why one is the best in this article.

In this post, we will look at code comparison, their variations, functionalities, and which one is recommended for managing your state application with a practical code example for a better understanding. We will also consider the languages, features and community support each offer.

Table of Contents

• Introduction to Pinia and Vuex
• Features of Pinia and Vuex
• Code Comparison of Pinia and Vuex
• Pros and Cons of Pinia and Vuex
• Which should I use—Pinia or Vuex?
• Conclusion

Introduction to Pinia and Vuex

I’ll briefly summarize Vuex and Pinia. If you want a more thorough explanation, I suggest reading the Vuex documentation and the Pinia documentation.

What Is Pinia?

Pinia is a new state management library that helps you manage and store reactive data and state across your components in your Vue.js application. Pinia was created by one of the Vue core team members, Eduardo San Martin Morote.

Pinia uses the new reactivity system to build an intuitive and fully typed state management system.

The new features that have been introduced to the library are one of the factors contributing to Pinia’s recommendation. Overall, Pinia appears light, uncomplicated and straightforward to master. It has everything that can make programming in Vue 3 and Vue 2 versatile. Therefore, this is the ideal opportunity to try out Pinia.

What is Vuex?

Vuex is a state management pattern and library built as a centralized store to help you maintain the state of all the components present in your Vue application. Vuex follows rules that ensure your state is mutated to a predicted standard.

One factor that makes Vuex more potent is that the components derive their state from the Vuex store and can react quickly and effectively to changes in the store’s state.

Although Vuex is the state management library for maintaining your store, it is advised that you are familiar with or have built a large-scale SPA. Vuex can be verbose and intimidating if you are not experienced.

You can use Vuex if your application is extensive, you need to manage complex data flow, and you have nested components. Check out the official documentation for more knowledge on when to use Vuex.

Features of Pinia

One of the differences between Pinia and Vuex is that Pinia is “modular by design” in other words, it is built to have multiple stores, while Vuex only has one store. Inside those stores, you can have submodules. Aside from that, Pinia allows each of these modules to be imported from their store directly into components where needed.

Modular by Design

If you are a Vue developer and have worked with Vuex in managing the state of your application, you will notice that Vuex has only one store. In that store, you can have multiple modules within it. With Pinia, you can have each of these modules to be stored in a single place and import them directly into the component when they request it.

This method allows the bundler to code-split them automatically and provide better TypeScript inferences.

Full Devtool Support

Pinia offers devtool support to help you build and easily debug using the library. When we install Pinia, it automatically gets hooked into our Vue.js devtools and lets us track what changes are being made to our store, which gives us a smooth developer experience in the Vue.js version (Vue 2 and Vue3).

Pinia Is Intuitive

Pinia provides a simple API that makes the writing of your stores easy and well organized, just like creating a component. This means fewer boilerplates and concepts to grasp compared to the Vuex solution.

Pinia Is Extensible

Pinia additionally offers a complete plugin system with features like transactions and local storage synchronization for those circumstances where the default behavior of Pinia is insufficient.

TypeScript Support

Pinia offers better TypeScript support than Vuex, with the Javascript auto-complete feature, which makes the development process easy.

Pinia Is Light

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

Features of Vuex

Module

When your application expands, it gets tough to traverse. However, using the Vuex module, you can split your store into several files based on the domain function and access the state cycles from the module in that specific namespace.

Devtool Support

The Vuex tab in the Vue devtools allows us to view the state and keep track of our mutations. This lets us quickly assess how our program performs and debug bugs.

Hot Reload

The hot reload function is supported in Vuex, which uses the hot module replacement API of webpack to quickly reload your mutations, modules, actions and getters as you develop.

TypeScript Support

If you want to write a TypeScript store definition, Vuex makes its typings available and easier to implement. It has a default TypeScript configuration, not requiring extra settings.

Code Comparison of Pinia and Vuex

Pinia is a lightweight library to help you manage the reactive state across your application. The Pinia API is straightforward to learn and makes your code very simple to read compared to Vuex.

Let’s check out a code comparison of managing our state with Pinia and Vuex:

Vuex

In this example, we will look at a simple Vuex store that tracks the state of a to-do list items:

import { createStore } from 'vuex'

const TodoListstore = createStore({
  state() {
    return {
      todoListItems: []
    }
  },
  actions: {
    addNewList({ commit }, item) {
    {
      commit('createNewItem', item)
    }
  },
  mutations: {
    createNewItem(state, item) {
      state.todoListItems.push(item)
    }
  }
})
   

If you look at the code above, you can see the three actions: states, actions and mutations in the Vuex store. The state returns the current todoListItems, the action commits a mutation to create a new item, and finally, the mutation creates the new item and adds it to the list. When you construct a larger application, you may realize that the action and mutation are relatively similar, leading to redundant code because each state change requires a boilerplate.

Pinia

With the Pinia simple API, you can eliminate the mutation and redundant code. Let’s check out a code example of what the previous code looks like when you implement it with Pinia:

import { defineStore } from 'pinia'

Export const useListStore = defineStore('list', {
  state() => ({
    return {
      todoListItems: []
    }
  }),
  actions: {
    addNewList() {  
      this.todoListItems.push(item)
    }
  }})

The above example is a simple code of how the Pinia API works when managing the state of your application. With Pinia, we removed the mutation and updated it directly into our actions.

Note: In the code example above, we don’t need to track our items when we commit them directly to our actions.

Pros and Cons of Pinia and Vuex

Pinia and Vuex are excellent tools for controlling your application’s state, but one must have some features that the other does not. Let’s examine what they are.

Pros of Pinia

• Pinia allows you to modify your stores without reloading the page.
• It provides TypeScript support and a good autocomplete feature in JavaScript.
• Pinia provides devtool support, which helps in enhancing the developer experience with the tool.
• Pinia only has state, getters and actions. No mutations are necessary.
• With Pinia, you can store the state in a single place and pass it to their component when requested.
• It is a lightweight library with a weight of 1 KB.
• It offers server-side rendering support and automatic type modules without extra work.
• Pinia is compatible with Vue 2 and Vue 3.

Cons of Pinia

• It doesn’t have large community support and solutions compared to Vuex.
• Pinia doesn’t support debugging functions, like time travel and editing.

Pros of Vuex

• Vuex has mutations, getters and actions.
• The community support for Vuex is large compared to Pinia.
• Vuex supports debugging functions, like time travel and editing.

Cons of Vuex

• It is not TypeScript friendly.
• You can only use it for a large-scale SPA.

Which Should I Use: Pinia or Vuex?

Well, this is where it gets more challenging because there are still projects where you will need to utilize Vuex to handle your state application, even if Pinia is the new recommended state management library. It has several valuable capabilities Vuex doesn’t.

Vuex is still the ideal solution for constructing a large-scale SPA because it is pretty lengthy for people building small-medium scale applications.

Same with Pinia. Still, if you need all of the listed features, such as devtool support, TypeScript support and easy management of your state application, then Pinia is the best solution for that—it gives you a smooth development experience.

If you are building a less complex application, be it a medium-to-extensive one, you can use Pinia because its weight is around 1 KB.

Conclusion

Choosing between Vuex and Pinia can be confusing when managing the state of your application due to their varied functionalities. Still, both frameworks are excellent for managing your state application. This article has included a brief comparison of their features, functions and impacts on the code. After reading this essay, perhaps you will be able to navigate which library is right for you.