We all love a good comparison.
Mac vs PC, Ali vs Foreman, LeBron vs Jordan. Start typing ‘something vs…’ into Google, and if people have strong opinions about the subject, you’ll get a stream of predicted suggestions, then dozens, if not hundreds, of articles when you finish the search phrase.
Case in point, React vs Angular — the two most popular JavaScript front-end frameworks for building web applications. An awful lot of ink has been split comparing the two. Honestly, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the volume of information and opinion.
For any business, choosing a technology stack requires time and resources, and that commitment often extends long after development. So, when comparing one stack to another, your choice must reflect your business’ strengths and your stakeholders’ needs — now and into the future.
Philosophy
If you were to ask, ‘which is better, React or Angular?’, I’d say you’re asking the wrong question — or, if I were feeling trite, I’d say something about apples and oranges. Fundamental to the difference between the two isn’t a checkbox of features but the philosophy on which each is based.
Fundamentally, the difference in philosophy means that Angular is complete and consistent but inflexible. Conversely, React is modular and places much of the architectural decisions in the hands of the developer.
Performance
Although Angular has made incremental improvements to its performance, its use of a real DOM (Document Object Model) puts it at a disadvantage compared to React, which uses a Virtual DOM.
In the traditional DOM, any state change to an element triggers an update to all child elements. This process is computationally heavy, as the entire object tree must be analysed with every application state.
React’s Virtual DOM creates a virtual tree to represent the UI, with each component addressable through declarative means. When the app or a component changes state, React evaluates the virtual DOM and calculates the difference with the DOM, making changes only where required. This process of selectively updating the DOM by proxy is much more efficient and results in faster UI rendering.
Another string to React’s performance bow is that the library is lightweight, with a gzipped size of less than 35 KB. Angular, with its kitchen-sink functionality, creates much larger apps. The size difference can amount to increased network latency. However, as React apps become complex and developers add other libraries, that advantage becomes somewhat eroded.
“As a Senior developer, I appreciate the flexibility and scalability that React offers. While it may not provide the same level of built-in features as Angular, its ability to efficiently manage complex UI components and handle large amounts of data make it an ideal choice for many projects. Using React, I am able to deliver high-quality solutions that are tailored to the specific needs of each client.”
Learning curve
Should you choose to learn either, a wealth of learning materials is available for both platforms, including documentation, tutorials and training courses. But which is the harder of the two to learn?
React
Angular
Flexibility
React
As a UI library, React is much more flexible regarding developer choice and support for different environments and runtimes. React’s built for modularity, encouraging re-using and sharing of components not only within the project, but also between projects. React works great when you’re building a library of consistent UI elements you can easily share across your organisation’s suite of products – even if they exist in different code bases.
Underpinning React’s flexibility is its bare-boned design. React gives you what you need to build UI-components, leaving you to choose every additional library or helper your app requires. Fortunately, React has no shortage of compatible, third-party, open-source packages and libraries – often with multiple choices for any given feature – easily installed and added to your project with NPM.
Another way where React’s flexibility shines is into one-way databinding, which gives developers far more control in how data flows through the UI, and makes the model easier to scale and maintain over time.
React works well in a mixed technology stack and is a better choice for building lightweight, design-heavy apps or bringing web technologies to mobile and native app development. Its flexibility and laser focus on UI make it a popular choice in other open-source projects like Gatsby, Strapi, and low-code platforms like BudiBase.
Angular
On the other hand, Google designed Angular with complex, enterprise apps in mind. As a complete framework, Angular gives developers the tools to build large-scale, feature-rich applications. Its well-structured architecture also makes Angular apps easier for developers to familiarise themselves with existing projects, even if they are very large.
Angular provides developers with everything they need out of the box, and that can spare developers from the tyranny of choice. Thanks to Angular’s wide-spread adoption, particularly in the enterprise, there’s a good chance someone has already created and made available a solution to you problem.
Components
Modular, reusable UI components are the cornerstone of modern web development, and both React and Angular provide the tools for creating them, however, they differ in several ways.
Angular’s UI layer uses a component-based architecture, where developers first import the Component class from Angular’s core API, and then define the component’s metadata (including its template) using a decorator. Angular’s component template uses HTML and directives to structure the UI and bind data to the model. The component is then exported as a class, with properties pass as instance variables to Angular’s binding mode.
In React, when a user updates the input element, the change is sent to React’s App state model, which triggers the change in React’s Virtual DOM.
import {Component} from '@angular/core';
@Component({
selector: app-root',
template:
<h1>{{title}}</h1>
<input [(ngModel)]="title" type="text".
})
export class AppComponent {
title ='Hello World';
}
In React, components use a functional programming paradigm. Each component is a function that inherits properties (props) and returns the UI elements. React’s templating differs from Angular’s in that it uses JavaScript to define UI elements, with most developers opting to use the JSX library, which allows expressions to be embedded into the UI template.
In Angular, the property is passed to the ngModel directive, which places it within Angular’s two-way binding model — we’ll explore data binding next.
import React, {useState} from ‘react’;
function AppComponent() {
const [title, setTitle] = useState(‘Hello World’);
return (
<div>
<h1>{title}</h1>
<input
value={title}
onChange={e => setTitle(e.target.value)}
type=”text” />
</div>
);
}
export default AppComponent;
Data binding
Data binding is a key differentiator between React and Angular, with the former using one-way binding and the latter using two-way binding.
In React’s one-way binding, changes to the model are passed to a component as read-only properties, and a component cannot change its properties. UI updates occur in React only when the component state changes, typically when its parent passes a new or updated property and triggers a re-render. This architecture provides React with a performance advantage, particularly in larger applications.
In Angular’s two-way binding, a model change is automatically reflected in the UI component, and changes to a component automatically update the model. This architecture allows Angular developers to create dynamic and interactive user interfaces with less code, as there’s no need to trigger a component update when the model or application state changes. However, this flexibility results in a performance hit, particularly in larger applications, where dozens or hundreds of components are constantly in flux.
Ecosystem
Thanks to their popularity, React and Angular have a vast and active ecosystem that developers can draw upon for support, documentation, tutorials, and tooling. Though React is more popular, and thus has the larger ecosystem, Angular’s broad adoption — particularly in the enterprise — means that you would be hard-pressed not to find a solution to any problem you may encounter. Both platforms have a vast collection of first- and third-party libraries you can drop into your code.
React
- Are you building a Single Page application? Add React Router to handle user routing.
- Want to improve state management and AJAX? Add Redux and Axios.
- Want animation support? Add React-motion.
- Are you building a native app for mobile or desktop? React Native has you covered.
- Want to use CSS frameworks and component libraries? Take your pick from Material UI, Tailwind, Bootstrap, PrimeReact or more.
Angular
Though Angular is a complete framework, giving you everything from animation to AJAX support, you can extend it with component libraries, such as Angular Material, NGX Bootstrap, PrimeNG, and many more.
In either choice, both Angular and React provide developers with useful tools for debugging. Debugging is also easier when you understand the underlying library or framework well. Although Angular is more complex, and has more moving parts, there is an implicit and consistent structure that, once mastered, makes it easier to see where and why your code is breaking. React by contrast, is less complex, but adding additional libraries can potentially increase complexity.
Debugging
Fortunately, React and Angular are mature platforms with various tools to help mitigate this perennial pain.
React provides the React Developer Tools, a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox, that allows you to inspect and debug React components. The extension displays a detailed view of the virtual DOM, enabling developers to examine the current state and props of components.
Angular also provides a browser-based debugging extension, Batarang, for Chrome and Firefox. Similar to its React counterpart, it visually represents your application’s structure, including the current state of the app and its components. Additionally, Angular’s two-way binding model can simplify debugging, as errors in the view or model are automatically propagated and easier to identify.
Recommendations
While you can make a case for React or Angular for just about any project, their differences, strengths, and weakness give each a compelling use case for businesses with a particular set of requirements.
- Thanks to its larger community and ecosystem, far more React developers and resources are available.
- The library is an excellent choice for building projects requiring a fast, dynamic, interactive user experience without compromising performance.
- React is also the better choice when developers want more freedom from the constraints of an opinionated framework and want to choose the libraries they use.
- In this respect, React works betters with existing technology stacks, allowing you to replace older tech without throwing away your entire legacy stack.
- React is also an excellent choice for native mobile development.
- Conversely, Angular is the better choice when you know you’re building a large-scale, feature-rich application.
- What Angular sacrifices in raw performance, it gains a complete feature set and a more maintainable code base.
- Angular’s support for dependency injection encourages a mode modular, maintainable approach that can scale easier as a product grows.
- When you have to deal with lots of data, Angular’s two-way data binding allows you to update both model and UI with less code.
- Its use of TypeScript will also suit more experienced developers who prefer working with the strongly-typed programming language.
- Angular is also maintained and well-supported by Google and under their stewardship Angular’s grown into a reliable and secure solution.
- Taken together, Angular is an outstanding choice for the enterprise.
Concluding thoughts
When choosing between two technology platforms like React and Angular, answers aren’t always apparent, and decisions are seldom reached by technical differences alone. What you’re trying to build, what kind of technical debt you are saddled with, and what resources you can draw upon are good questions to ask before losing yourself in the technical weeds.
Once you have a clearer picture, evaluate each platform’s strengths and weaknesses related to your requirements. Try both, play with the tooling, and build prototypes that reflect the product you want to create. First-hand experience will soon surface a clear winner and enforce your decision.
Why choose React
- Design and performance is paramount.
- Much large ecosystem and marketplace of developers and third-party packages
- You want to reuse UI components across your organisation and products with ease.
- You already split your development between dedicated back- and front-end teams.
- Easy-to-learn, difficult to master. React is a great choice in teams with mixed experience levels where seniors can mentor juniors.
Why choose Angular
- Full-stack developer friendly that seasoned C#, Java and Typescript programmers will love.
- Feature-rich, kitchen-sink tooling. Chances are you won’t need anything else to build your front-end.
- Built for making developers their most productive, but at the cost of flexibility, choice and performance.
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