So Vue.js the progressive JavaScript framework. Well, I'm assuming that again you have some experience with JavaScript and maybe you've run jQuery or maybe you're familiar with another framework such as Angular or React or Knockout. And you're curious about what Vue does and maybe how it's different. Well, a couple of things I talk about is Vue is approachable, and I would say that's somewhat true compared at something like Angular. Angular is much more difficult than Vue and Vue is relatively easy to jump in there and get started with. There is some core concepts that you need to understand and that are very different than jQuery orders Vanilla JavaScript would you maybe coming from. And so that part can be a little bit tricky, but I think in general, from most of the frameworks and JavaScript frameworks out there Vue is pretty easy to get started with.
Of course, you can use Vue on something large or on a very small project and you can choose how you implement it. And there's a lots of different ways that implement Vue with packages. Maybe you're using Bower or you just want to run NPM or Yarn, and maybe you're using a CDN. So I'll show you some of those ways and methods that you can go in and get started with Vue. It's also very small. So 20 kilobytes in size is quite small considering if you're running something like jQuery or some other libraries that can be much larger than that. So it's got a pretty small footprint for what you're getting in the power that Vue provides. And Vue's I would say kind of fun once you get the hang of it, it can be very fun to work with the components and things that it goes and does. Before we get in that all that code and stuff let's talk about Vue in the sort of system or ecosystem of JavaScript frameworks.
So it's got quite a few sponsors now. It was originally started, if you go to the team page here on the view page by Evan You, he's the founder of Vue, and you can see there's a couple of people now on the team, quite a few actually that are going and adding to the code base and improving things. And you can see, they also have lots of sponsors. There was at first, they concerned with view that it may not catch on and that there was a massive framework and push for React. And I think the very first time that I sort of was looking at a JavaScript front end framework, I was looking at, I've worked with Knockout previously and a little bit with Angular and I was looking for something that was pretty easy, that was going to do this stuff that I needed.
So then I could use the most of the projects, and then I wouldn't have to just have this one thing that's only good for one type of project. And that was important for me to make that distinction. And I looked at React and I looked at Vue and I ended up learning in Vue first as it was pretty easy to get started. And it did just seem like I could throw it up and then add some code to it. And it was good. And I would start to get that sort of functionality so I can get that going.
But Vue sort of exploded in the last year. And there's lots and lots of developers who were jumping on board with the Vue, of course React is also exploding. I'd say these are the two most popular or Angular I think has been the big player, Angular a JavaScript framework by Google, React a JavaScript premier by Facebook. And then Vue is the open source one sort of made by the community. I guess you could say. So it doesn't have a direct backer as Google and Facebook are doing with React and Angular. So you can see that pretty much it's not something I think get before it was like, Oh, is it going to have support or something's going to happen? But you can see there's a quite bit of users on here that are providing support and adding and extending the functionality of Vue and Vue itself as you can see has 70,000 stars there.
So quite the library and again pretty easy to get started with. Also, you can see some of the support there and it's based on the downloads just this month here was about 800,000 downloads. And that's pretty crazy if you think about that. That's per month. So of course it's fully covered with unit tests, so you don't have to worry about all of that. And then it's MPM 2.52, and it has an MIT license. So if those are things that sort of you're concerned about it that takes care of that as well. And again you can see that it is well funded now. I mean, of course they could always have more money, right? The ecosystem itself, there are a lot of packages, of course with any JavaScript or PHP framework or any language, it's all about the packages and things that you can go and extend so that you don't have to write all the code yourself.
So they have Vue router, Vuex, Vue CLI, Vue-loader, server render. And these are just a couple the major sort of projects and packages that are going on with Vue, but there's a lot of Vue packages and I mean a lot like thousands of them out there, and you can normally find a Vue package for what you're doing, like what you need to look for, or you can just simply write a component. So with that, I'd say Vue is very popular. It's, you can see again lots of contributors to it. It is a great system to get started with. You really need to make the decision. And I assume you've already made the decision on whether you're going to start with a Vue or maybe you're going to start with React and they go about it a little bit different, and we'll jump into some of that about how that structure goes in the next episode.