I guess it depends on how complex the app is, but pulling vue into a page is trivial and gives you a lot of functionality without having to use vue files , es6, or a bundler. After building things with vue and the reactivity it gives you, writing traditional js code to turn knobs manually seems tedious. Vue (or react) eliminates ui state bugs which was probably the biggest source of bugs for me. I fail to see how, under any circumstances, jquery is a better option for handling the dynamic portions of your page .