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If you have been working with the Salesforce platform, then no doubt you’ve heard both terms – Lightning Component and Lightning Web Component (LWC) – but do you know how they differ from each other? It’s very important for Salesforce admins and developers to understand these differences to build more efficient and scalable Salesforce applications.
This blog will help you to identify the differences that exist between Lightning Components vs Lightning Web Components, and how you can use both to create even better applications. By the end, you’ll have a better idea of how both work and which to use on your next project.
Key Takeaways
- Lightning Web Components (LWC) are built on new web standards, thus they’re faster and more efficient than traditional Aura-based Lightning Components.
- LWC takes advantage of native browser features, eliminating the need for the heavy framework-driven code seen in Lightning Components.
- While both are utilized to create Salesforce apps, LWC represents the future of Salesforce development, providing improved performance and easier connectivity with other web standards.
What is a Lightning Component?
Lightning Components, popularly known as Aura Components, was the first framework provided by Salesforce for developing dynamic and responsive applications. Lightning Components were developed for developers to create single-page applications that have a seamless interaction capability with the Salesforce back-end. It was a good alternative to the traditional Visualforce (which is used for classic UI development) because of its flexibility, better performance, and responsiveness.
Key Features of Lightning Components:
- Component-Based Development: You build applications by composing reusable components that may be nested and reused across various parts of the application.
- Event-Driven Model: Through events, one component can communicate with another component by sending data to each other.
- Server-Side Support: The back-end of Salesforce is very closely coupled to support Lightning Components, making it easier for you to retrieve and manipulate the data.
- Cross-Browser Compatibility: Lightning Components are designed to work on different browsers, It also ensures that all the applications work flawlessly for all the users.
What Is a Lightning Web Component (LWC)?
In 2019, Salesforce introduced the Lightning Web Component, which is a more modern and lightweight structure, to overcome some of the limitations inherent in traditional Lightning Components. LWC is built on standards like JavaScript, HTML, and modern browser APIs, which make it faster and more efficient than its predecessor.
Key Features of Lightning Web Components (LWC)
- Web Standards-Based: LWC is standards-based and is fully constructed on modern web standards. As a result, it utilizes features native to the browser and therefore fewer overheads and better performance.
- Faster Performance: LWC makes the most of the native browser functionality, and in cases of dealing with large-sized data and complex user interfaces, it leaves Lighting Components far behind.
- Reusable and Lightweight: LWC has made the component more modular and lightweight, thereby making maintenance and scaling of applications much easier.
- More Flexibility: LWC allows developers to use standard JavaScript, so it is simpler to write, test, and debug code.
- Better Security: LWC adapts the latest web security standards; among them is Locker Service.
Differences Between Lightning Component vs Lightning Web Component
Let’s now go over the differences between them in brief, knowing what Lightning Components and Lightning Web Components are.
1. Underlying Technology
- Lightning Components: Developed on top of Salesforce’s Aura framework that provides its own custom development models to develop applications.
- Lightning Web Components (LWC): Built on top of modern web standards like native JavaScript, HTML5, and modern browser APIs, which brings down the necessity of custom development models and uses what the browser already provides.
In simple words, whereas Lightning Components requires the knowledge of Salesforce-specific understanding, LWC opens the gateway to developers who are from standard web technologies such as JavaScript. This means that if you’ve ever developed a web app outside of Salesforce, then LWC will feel much more familiar and intuitive.
2. Performance
- Lightning Components: Since it uses more custom abstractions (Aura), it may sometimes take time to execute as compared to web standards-based frameworks.
- Lightning Web Components (LWC): LWC is much faster and more efficient, particularly when dealing with large data sets and complex components, as it leverages native browser APIs.
LWC isn’t theoretically fast-it’s noticeably quicker in the real world, and that translates into a lot when your application needs to consume updates or large chunks of data without debilitating lag.
3. Development Experience
- Lightning Components demands a deeper understanding of Aura and has a steeper curve for developers who are not used to the architecture of Salesforce.
- Lightning Web Components is likely to be easier to learn for developers familiar with modern web technologies. It operates on standard JavaScript and HTML, hence more accessible.
4. Component Communication
- Lightning Components: It supports the events (at application level and component level) for components to be able to talk to each other. However, the model can very easily get complex if components reach hundreds.
- Lightning Web Components (LWC): It also supports events for inter-component communication but now in a standard DOM event manner, which is easier and more aligned with best practices in modern web development.
The LWC-based event model tends to be less cumbersome compared to other primary event systems when you’ve got some experience working with modern web frameworks like React or Vue. Thus, it makes dealing with components at a large scale less painful without the headache of dealing with custom Salesforce events.
5. Browser Compatibility
- Lightning Components: Built with multiple browsers in mind, they usually don’t tap into the maximum benefits and everything related to the latest version of the browser.
- Lightning Web Components (LWC): Built to tap into the maximum benefits of all modern browser capabilities.
With your users on the latest versions of browsers, you could run at maximum performance with LWC. As the browsers continue to evolve, LWC will evolve ahead of them, meaning more future-proof solutions down the road.

Winding Up
Lastly, it is better to sum up that in the differentiation of lightning component vs lightning web component, it makes perfect sense to say that LWC is the future of Salesforce development. Its speed and more up-to-date development practices with broader compatibility mean it will be the framework of newly built applications. However, in that respect, Lightning Components, or Aura, aren’t dead in the water, not for legacy systems that haven’t migrated to LWC yet, at least.
It would allow Salesforce Admins and developers to make sound decisions while constructing or upgrading the application for you. Now, with LWC becoming a new standard, this is a great opportunity to get familiar with it and really master it for your next project.
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