Can AngularJS be faster than React?

Short answer: yes and no

A while ago, I read a blog post that shows that Angular’s ng-repeat with “track by” is faster than React. I didn’t test it myself back then and when I needed to build a large table with a bunch of buttons using Angular, I thought that it shouldn’t be a problem, cause I can just use “track by” that will make the table render really quickly. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case, I faced a lot of rendering performance issues and “track by” barely made a difference.

After struggling for some time I decided to build this table using React. As expected, the table started to render 3 times faster than before. That inspired me to design a couple of use cases and test rendering performance of Angular, Angular with “track by” and React:

Rendering Data Table (1k rows)

This is very basic example. Table just needs to be populated.

GitHub
Angular demo
Angular with track-by demo
React demo

Re-rendering Data Table

In this example table data is updated every 20ms:

GitHub
Angular demo
React demo
Angular with track-by demo

Conclusion

Based on the rendering tests, Angular with track-by is faster for re-rendering the data-table and React is faster for initial rendering of the data-table.

If you face initial rendering performance issues with Angular, just combine Angular and React, there are many good ways to do that.

Thank you for reading.
Follow me on Twitter and let me know in the comment section bellow in what other cases Angular can faster than React.