Vue Router package has been standard for handling application routing and navigation. The community and support have been crucial and fundamental to our projects.
But recently, a new alternative has emerged in the community: Kitbag Router. Considered a modern router written and adapted with TypeScript, it aims to improve the developer experience by offering a typed, secure, and robust tool for applications. This alternative search to eliminate routing problems and provide a more user friendly experience (UX) and developer experience (DX).
First, let's review key differences, weak points or risks, and recommendations to understand in which situations it is best to use them depending on the type of project we are working on.
What is Vue Router?
Vue Router is the official router of the Vue ecosystem. It manages static and dynamic routes, declarative navigation, scrolling behavior, history modes, and more.
Key advantages of Vue Router
- Extensive documentation, examples, and a great community.
- Built-in features such as scrolling, history mode, nested routing, and others.
- Maturity and stability. It's the standard, backed by the core Vue team.
- Compatibility with the entire traditional Vue stack and ecosystem plugins.
What is Kitbag Router?
Kitbag Router is an alternative router built from scratch in TypeScript, with a focus on security, robustness, and predictability.
Kitbag Router introduces a fresh, developer-centric approach to routing in Vue.js applications.
At the heart of Kitbag Router lies a commitment to enhancing the developer experience. First and foremost that means type safety, but also better parameter experience, support for query, rejection handling, simple intuitive syntax, and an extensible design written with modern Typescript.
Kitbag router - official website
Features of Kitbag router
- More powerful parameters: Not just strings you can define parameters of type Number, Boolean, Date, JSON, RegExp, or even custom types. This allows routes with IDs, dates, booleans, etc.
- Type safety: Routes, parameters, and queries are strongly typed; if you wanto to change anything in the route configuration, TS will warn you in development.
- Reduced weight and modern design: Kitbag Router boasts a small size, with minimal dependencies. Check bundlephobia
- Typed query parameters: query parameters can be defined and validated just like route parameters
Advantages of using Kitbag Router today
- 🧰 Automatically validated and written parameters: ideal for complex applications where route parameters have specific types (IDs, dates, booleans, etc.).
- 🔒 Fewer runtime errors due to misnamed paths or missing parameters: Since everything is typed, when you change paths, names, or parameters, compilation will fail if there are inconsistencies. This improves maintainability.
- ✅ Easy transition to a Typescript oriented setup + modern composition
- 🌐 Queries + params + state + meta + hooks + prefetching and many modern features built in natively.
- ❌ Rejections: You can assign views to handle whatever rejections you need, not only 404/not found.
Some users community mention:
“Type safety everywhere… amazing parameters… support for parameters in query… built in rejection handling” ~ Reddit ~
“The new type safe Vue Router is definitely an excellent router,” although some still prefer the original Vue Router for its long term support.
Migrating from Vue Router
If you are considering migrating from Vue Router to Kitbag Router, it is important to know which features are covered or complete and what is not yet available. You can check official documentation in more detail.
- ✅ Nested routes mapping
- ✅ Dynamic Routing
- ✅ Modular, component-based router configuration
- ✅ Route params, query, wildcards
- ✅ View transition effects powered by Vue.js' transition system
- ✅ Fine-grained navigation control
- ✅ Links with automatic active CSS classes
- ✅ HTML5 history mode or hash mode
- ❌ Customizable Scroll Behavior
- ✅ Proper encoding for URLs
Weak points, risks, or why it might not be suitable?
- 🔄 Risk of lower adoption and small community: This can hinder support, documentation or integration into larger projects or those with many collaborators.
- 🧑💻 Learning curve: Perhaps way routes are defined is more explicit, which can feel more verbose compared to simpler definitions. Some developers in the community see this as "more upfront work," especially in small projects.
- 🤔 Limitations for teams that do not use TypeScript: It requires a solid understanding of TypeScript to truly benefit from it. In teams that work primarily with JavaScript, this can become a real obstacle.
- 🔧 More explicit configuration = greater verbosity: This is a great advantage for TypeScript, but it can be tedious; defining routes can feel longer, or complex nested routes require more code.
Conclusion
Kitbag Router is a very attractive and could be an excellent alternative, especially if you want to experiment with a new approach to routing in modern projects using Vue 3 and TypeScript, where type safety and maintainability are paramount. If you're starting a new project, it might be worth exploring it thoroughly.
However, given that it's still relatively new and doesn't have the same adoption or maturity as Vue Router, its use should be carefully considered, along with validating compatibility requirements and the potential learning curve. I'd like to emphasize that it's an open-source project, so your input is very helpful. If you're interested, you can check the official repository.
