Last March, the Lightning Web Components (LWC) and Developer Tooling teams ran our first State of LWC survey. Our goal was to better understand how we can best help you as you develop with LWC. Additionally, we wanted to understand how satisfied you are with what our team is building; it doesn’t matter that we’re building something if you’re not actually satisfied with it. 

The feedback you provided in our 2023 survey enabled us to deliver on your top-requested improvement to LWC, Dynamic Components, and we have begun to address your other asks to improve the overall LWC developer experience.

We want to thank you so much for your responses in the 2023 survey. But we also want to continue hearing your valuable insights, we’re launching our 2024 State of LWC Survey that will run through the end of March 2024. 

Take the 2024 State of LWC Survey now!

We want to continue to be transparent with you about our efforts to improve the developer experience going forward. To see what developers told us last year, and how we’re responding, read on for the results of our 2023 survey. 

Grab your favorite drink of choice, and let’s dig in.

2023 State of LWC Survey results

Demographics

Before we look at what developers want to see improved, it’s important to understand who provided feedback in the first survey.

Over 500 Salesforce Developers participated from over 45 different countries, with the majority coming from the United States, India, United Kingdom, and France. 

Responses came from developers who work for large and small companies alike. 190 respondents develop for companies that have more than 1,000 employees, with the remainder coming from smaller organizations. What was also great to see was how many of the Salesforce products you build with, including the following top 10 products:

1. Sales Cloud: 419
2. Service Cloud: 383
3. Experience Cloud: 299
4. Platform: 253
5. Marketing Cloud: 105
6. Salesforce Mobile App: 97
7. Heroku: 79
8. Slack: 56
9. Commerce Cloud: 53
10. Others: 548

How respondents feel about Lightning Web Components

For us product managers, it is always important to not only understand what to build but to also ensure that what has been built is meeting customer needs. Before LWC, we had Aura, which gave us an initial baseline to ensure that we were moving in the right direction. 

To further analyze the LWC developer experience, we calculated the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score for LWC, Aura, and Visualforce. The results show that LWC leads the pack of Salesforce Platform frameworks with a score of 4.13. LWC was superior to both Aura and Visualforce, but since 5 is a perfect score, it shows that we still have work to do.

Why are you using Aura?

With the customer satisfaction score for Aura being so low compared to LWC, it begs the question, “Why are developers using Aura?” 

Well, we asked this question and developers told us that it’s primarily due to key feature gaps between Aura and LWC.

As a senior consultant with more than three years of experience said, “It’s totally about feature parity. If I had LWC versions of all of the Aura [out of the box] components, I would always do everything full LWC.”

What are the top gaps between Aura and LWC?

We then asked the question, ”What are the top gaps between Aura and LWC?” This resulted in our understanding that developers most wanted to see Dynamic Components available for LWC, which can help you avoid loading large modules that you don’t always need to achieve the same result. 

Great news! Dynamic Components have become Generally Available in the Spring 2024 release — thus addressing the top reason for Aura utilization vs. LWC. This was then followed by the Workspace API, which is generally available in the Spring 2024 release as well. 

We’ll continue to work down this list to fill in these key gaps as we want to continue to unlock improved efficiencies and a better LWC developer experience. To summarize, the top 10 gaps reported were:

1. Dynamic Components
2. Workspace API
3. Lightning Actions
4. PDF Export
5. List view buttons
6. Utility Bar
7. Dependency Injection
8. Lightning Out
9. Overrides

How can we improve LWC?

New features

We can improve the Salesforce Platform developer experience by filling in the gaps between LWC and Aura, enabling you to use LWC more on the platform, but what can we do to improve the LWC experience when you’re using it? 

Here are the top 10 feature requests from survey respondents:

1. Dynamic Components
2. State Management
3. Local Development
4. Custom Wire Adapters
5. Component Code Organization
6. NPM Integration
7. Reactive Controllers
8. CSS Animation Library
9. Context API
10. Tooling to detect unnecessary re-renders

As noted earlier, Dynamic Components are now Generally Available in the Spring 2024 release. More great news — based on the results of this survey, the LWC team has begun work on a state management solution. 

Additionally, numerous teams have begun working together to create a cohesive local development experience across the Salesforce Platform when using LWC. We’ve begun reaching out to developers to research our vision for this solution, and we can’t wait to share more about it later this year.

Debugging

Over 40% of respondents said they spend one to more than five hours per day debugging LWC, which is the antithesis of a good developer experience. 

Upon asking what the top ten areas you spend your time debugging, you told us:

1. Cryptic Warnings (48.4%)
2. Network Requests (30.4%)
3. Crashes and Hangs (26.8%)
4. Lightning Web Security (25.6%)
5. Component Re-renders (24%)
6. Performance (22.8%)
7. User Interface/User Experience (20.8%)
8. Unit Tests (13.2%)
9. Mobile (10.8%)
10. Accessibility (8.4%)

This is a key metric that we will be working to reduce. Please continue to send us any debugging issues via the Trailblazer Community forum or via support cases, so that we have more data to help us improve your experience.

Mobile

Mobile utilization of Salesforce products has continued to increase, so we wanted to understand how you approach building your solutions across a variety of devices. We asked, “Do you all build or plan to build LWCs that will run on mobile?” And you told us:

1. Yes (68.46%)
2. No (31.54%)

For those of you who do build for mobile, we inquired where you expect to debug your mobile experiences, and your top responses were:

1. Chrome/Safari/Browser debugger linked to emulators (34.44%)
2. VSCode/IDE (29.88%)
3. VSCode with Salesforce Extensions (26.97%)
4. Mobile-specific tooling (6.22%)
5. Other (2.49%)

Tooling

Along with questions on local development and mobile tooling, we also wanted to know more about the tools that you are aware of and use, and your satisfaction with them.

Our first question was, “Which Salesforce builder and developer tools do you use, have used, or are aware of?” The results were interesting — the top 10 most used tools were:

1. Lightning App Builder
2. VS Code with Salesforce Extensions
3. Salesforce CLI
4. Flow Builder
5. Setup Menu
6. Developer Console
7. Workbench
8. Experience Builder
9. Salesforce Page Objects
10. Schema Builder

A key positive that we noticed is that many of our older products are being used less frequently as they are replaced by newer solutions. There is still work that we can do to increase awareness of some of our tools, such as UTAM and mobile tools.

When asked how satisfied developers were with the various tools for debugging and building LWC, you reported a high level of satisfaction with the browser dev tools, Salesforce CLI, and VSCode with Salesforce Extensions. We see that the largest opportunity by far is with local development. As noted prior in this post, we’re bringing together numerous teams to begin delivering a complete solution for this ask.

Finally, we asked you to rank the importance of the following LWC tools, and your response was:

1. Browser dev tools
2. Programmatic validation and guidance in VSCode/IDE
3. Guides, Best Practices, Sample documentation
4. Local Development
5. Salesforce Browser Extension
6. Easier automated testing for LWC
7. StackExchange / Trailblazer Community Forums
8. Simulators and Emulators for mobile apps
9. Local mobile previews

Conclusion

We’re excited to continue to improve the LWC experience for Salesforce Developers, and these annual surveys give us vital feedback from our community. Take the 2024 State of LWC Survey today to add your voice and help us improve the developer experience moving forward.

About the author

Greg Whitworth is the Sr. Director of Product on the Salesforce Platform. You can follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.