Announcing our new Admin UI: A Move to React

At Vendure, we’re committed to delivering the best developer experience possible. From our core architecture to our extension framework, we constantly evolve to meet modern developer needs.

This transition is more than a framework switch. It’s about empowering developers with tools they already love, increasing development speed, and aligning Vendure’s tech stack with the broader ecosystem.

Why We’re Making This Change

A Data-Driven Decision

The shift to React is grounded in real-world developer preferences. Surveys consistently show React’s dominance, 83% adoption compared to Angular’s 20% (State of JS 2024). We’ve also heard from our community that Angular often felt like a hurdle in customizing and extending the Vendure Admin UI.

Beyond popularity, this move brings alignment with modern commerce stacks. Many storefronts built on Vendure already use React-based frameworks like Next.js and Remix. By unifying our stack, developers can now work with the same technologies across both frontend and backend systems.

Ideal Developer Profile

In sales, knowing your ideal customer profile (ICP) is key. We took the same approach with our product strategy, asking: "Who are the developers we want using Vendure?" When we mapped this to our ICP, it became clear: Angular isn’t the right fit for most developers in e-commerce companies and agencies. While Angular is powerful, it’s built for large-scale enterprise applications, not headless storefronts. As a result, many developers in our target audience have little experience with it, making it an extra layer of complexity rather than an advantage.

Meeting Modern Expectations

Developers expect fast iteration cycles, flexible architectures, and minimal boilerplate. The current Angular-based UI comes with long build times, complex state management, and an increasing maintenance burden. By moving to React, we’re addressing these challenges head-on, providing:

Faster build and iteration times (thanks to Vite)
Lightweight, unopinionated components for easier extensibility.
Modern UI primitives (ShadCN, Tailwind) for improved consistency

The New Tech Stack

Vendure’s new Admin UI is built on a modern, developer-first stack, designed for extensibility and performance.

Core Pillars

React: Component-driven, aligning with Vendure’s existing UI extension patterns
Vite: Instant dev server, optimized builds, and 10x faster HMR compared to Webpack
Tailwind + ShadCN: A unified design system replacing Clarity UI
Storybook: Improved discoverability of UI components for developers building extensions
TanStack Suite
- Query: Seamless API calls with GraphQL auto-typed support
- Table: High-performance data tables with a custom Data Table Engine
- Form: Strong automation for validation, mutations, and form building

Wins for Developers

✅ Speed: Faster builds and real-time hot module replacement (HMR)
✅ Familiarity: React’s broad adoption and ease of use
✅ Extensibility: Seamless extension through extensive APIs
✅ Ecosystem: Leverage a vast set of libraries and tools for faster development

What This Means for the Vendure Community

For Existing Users

We understand that transitions take time. That’s why we’re supporting the Angular-based Admin UI until June 2026.

18-month overlap period: Both UIs will coexist, allowing ample migration time
New Admin UI is a separate package, so existing implementations remain unaffected
Simplified extension workflows: Less boilerplate, more customization options

For New Developers

Faster onboarding with React’s widely-used ecosystem
Skill portability: Work with the same tools across our Admin UI and your frontends.

Powerful new Admin UI features

Layout Engine: Fully extensible with typed slotting mechanisms, so that you can place your extensions everywhere in the layout
Form Engine: 10x faster CRUD development with automated workflows, so that you don't need to do the heavy lifting
Data Table Engine: Build and extend Excel-like data table views without thinking about the complexities of it

Rollout Strategy

To make the transition smooth, we’re rolling out the new Admin UI in phases:

Alpha release (with v3.2 release)
- Basic functionality working
- CRUD of all entities and settings
Beta release
- External APIs for extensions
- Theming and Customization
- Multivendor Setup
- New Global Search
RC.1 release
- Feature complete
- No breaking API changes anymore
- Focus only bug fixing
RC.2 release
- Documentation
- Storybook Component Library
- Accessibility
- User Guides

We’ll provide:

📖 Comprehensive migration guides—mapping APIs from Angular to React
📚 Side-by-side documentation—legacy vs. new APIs
👨‍💻 Community support—ensuring a smooth transition for existing plugins

This approach allows our community to get their hands on the new Admin UI as early as possible. Furthermore, we are able to get early feedback and insights that is immensely valuable.

FAQ

Will this break my existing plugins?

Yes, but migrating will be significantly easier thanks to our new tooling. The shift to React allows for faster, more maintainable UI extensions with less code. Our approach is simple: Building UI extensions for our new Admin UI should be at least 10x faster than before. In reality this means, that building the existing ones from scratch should be much faster than migrating them line by line. Additionally, everything of your

Why not Vue or Svelte?

React’s ecosystem maturity and enterprise adoption make it the best choice for Vendure’s long-term roadmap. Furthermore, React is the most used technologies for headless storefronts. Technology alignment played a crucial role in this decision.

What’s the timeline?

Alpha: End of March 2025
Beta: April 2025
RC.1: May 2025
RC.2: June 2025

The Future of Vendure’s Admin UI

This shift marks an exciting evolution for Vendure. One that puts developer experience, speed, and extensibility first. We recognize the role Angular has played in our journey, but React enables us to build a faster, more powerful foundation for the future.

We can’t wait for you to try it. 🚀