Maison Lerouge came to us in January 2026: full e-commerce rebuild, internal team of 2 devs to scale to 6, strong SEO constraints (40% of revenue from organic). Our historical reflex would have said "React + Next.js". We ended up recommending Vue 3.5 + Nuxt 4. Here's the matrix we used.
The context
Current stack: Shopify Plus + custom theme, already saturated. Need for a custom front (PWA, B2B checkout, product configurator). Team: one Lead Eng, two mid React-natives, one junior to hire in 3 months.
Constraints: non-negotiable SEO (Core Web Vitals, LCP < 2.5s), TTI < 3s on 3G, 12,000 SKUs in catalog, max 4-min build time in CI.
The five decision criteria
- Hiring: Paris, juniors and mids available within 2 months.
- DX & maintenance: low churn for 3 years.
- Performance: LCP < 2.5s, JS bundle < 180 KB.
- SSR/SEO ecosystem: metadata, sitemap, robots, ISR/ISG.
- Team learning curve: cost to move from React to something else, or stay.
Why React would have won in 2022
Three reasons: the recruitment market (2× more React devs available at equal skill), Next.js as the de facto standard, and the ecosystem of specialized libs (Vercel, Sanity, Stripe Components, Clerk). We shipped 18 React projects in 2022-2024 without regret.
Why Vue 3.5 + Nuxt 4 won in 2026
The gap closed on three axes:
- Out-of-the-box perf: Nuxt 4 + Vapor mode = bundle 30% lighter than an equivalent Next.js on our internal POC.
- SFC + Composition API: junior team productive after 2 weeks, vs 4 on React + hooks (managing useEffect deps, memoization).
- i18n / SEO / SSR: {'@'}nuxtjs/i18n is more mature than next-intl for the FR/EN multi-locale we deploy everywhere.
The Vue recruitment market in Paris also woke up: we sourced two mid profiles in 6 weeks, vs 8 historically on React.
The verdict & its limits
Vue wins for Maison Lerouge. That doesn't mean Vue wins everywhere. If Maison Lerouge had been a B2B SaaS with 50% US clients, we'd have stayed on React (US ecosystem, Vercel, Supabase, more aligned integrations).
Frameworks aren't a religion anymore in 2026 — they're tools. The question isn't "React or Vue", it's "for THIS team, THIS roadmap, THIS market, what scales?".
If you're asking yourself the same question, let's look together.