Angular vs React
They have been fighting for years, but do we have a winner?
Web development is increasing at the same rate as technology. When you think about the JavaScript Ecosystem, you’ll almost certainly think of Angular and React, as they’re two of the most popular front-end development technologies. But how can you pick between angular vs react? Should you base your selection on the project’s specifications first? Or, in the early stages, consider its popularity and ramp-up time?
What’s the difference between Angular and React? For years, there has been an ongoing rivalry between these two prominent front-end technologies. So, which option is the best?
Every time front-end programming is required, the Angular vs React debate starts to inflate. The answer relies on a variety of circumstances, and even front-end developers have debated the topic for years.
However, we will take a look together on both technologies strengths, weaknesses and how they compare together so you can have a better understanding and an easier decision to make for your next project.
How it all started
Angular is an open-source JavaScript framework that is written in TypeScript. It was developed and powered by. The First Version was called “AngularJS”, which was released in the year 2010. The year 2016 saw the release of “Angular”, which was the second version, and a complete rewrite of AngularJS. Angular is used in Google’s one of the most important projects, Google AdWords.
React is an open-source JavaScript library that was developed by Facebook. It is based on JSX and JavaScript. The React Library divides the webpage into single components and simplifies the development of the interface. React was developed in the year 2012 when managing Facebook ads became difficult with simple HTML coding. It was open-sourced in the year 2013, and since then, it has been used by millions of developers. React has been extensively used in the UI of Facebook and Instagram.
Popularity
Angular vs React both have gained popularity over the discussion forums and among the developers’ community. While looking at the most popular platform’s stats, Angular has 80,7k stars, and React has 186k stars. One of the main reasons behind this gap in the number of the stars they have is the count of issues each one is facing. Angular being a fully-fledged framework completes the majority of the needs a developer has without the need of using other libraries (unless you want to), therefore the chances of new issues being created are higher in order to keep up with the market needs and package updates. On the contrary, React being the smaller library focusing on building user interfaces based on UI components has to use other libraries to achieve what a fully-fledged framework can do. So react as a standalone library faces a lower count of issues.
Use cases
Let’s see some of the most successful applications built by these technologies which made an impact in our life.
I am pretty sure we can state that both technologies can achieve amazing results.
Maturity
The maturity of the frameworks is an important point to consider before adopting it. Yes, you would want to use cutting-edge technology. However, maintaining a balance between new technology and time-proven approaches is always crucial. In our case both React and Angular are quite matured. This is proven by the large community that uses these frameworks and the number of stars they both have in GitHub, therefore a great advantage that comes with both these frameworks is the ease of resolving issues with the help of community support.
Learning curve
So, which is harder to jump into? The entry in Angular is tougher than React. It requires you to learn concepts such as modules, directives, decorators, services and templates and once you are done with these “basic” concepts than you have to move on to advanced concepts like AoT, RxJS etc. But once you are clear with the concepts, the rest is smooth sailing. Angular is like an arsenal of weapons, once you master its weapons there is no war you cannot win.
To start working with React, first you must have JavaScript knowledge and then JSX which is a syntax extension to JavaScript. Getting adapted to write components, managing internal states and using props configurations is mandatory for a good React developer. But React isn’t the full package so you have to learn other libraries usually used when working with React, for example React does not come with a routing library so that’s to us to take care of. Another vital library when working with React is Redux which takes pride in state management of apps.
Components
Angular comes with a complex and fixed structure. With Angular, the developers break down the codes into separate files, which makes it easier for them to re-use the templates and codes in other projects.
The React library doesn’t have a fixed format to write code in. The code written using the React library is well structured and readable. But I must state it is up to the teams or developers who work with React to use this trait of React (no fixed format) as an advantage or disadvantage.
Development Speed
The CLI of the Angular framework allows a great development experience. In big projects Angular CLI helps a lot with the development of components with ease. On the other side React likes to be more humble, giving you more freedom to do as you please. So, both React and Angular have their CLI which they will help you fasten your development time, giving you options such as creating projects from different boilerplates and generating resources. Taking for granted in the future you will know these both, I think you would like Angular for the CLI and React for the development speed.
Performance
Performance is the most important criteria while comparing frameworks. No user will judge your application by the time spent and hard work you put. Performance and experience are all that matters! Document Object Model (DOM) is used for the evaluation of the performance of each framework. DOM is a programming interface that organizes the HTML, XHTML, XML documents in the form of a tree. When using a real DOM, the whole tree behind the framework gets refreshed every time a change is made. This makes the process slower, and the framework’s performance declines. This problem is solved with the help of a Virtual DOM, that tracks the changes and ensures only specific elements are updated without affecting other parts of the tree. Angular uses real DOM for its applications, so you guessed right, performance of the application is affected, and it is slower. Also, the angular framework is huge, so bundle size is larger making apps slower. On the other side React uses Virtual DOM and it has smaller size, so we have a winner regarding performance. React rules!
Mobile apps
There is a whole article that can be written regarding their respective mobile frameworks, but I will keep it short and simple. Ionic fully subscribes to the philosophy of leveraging web technologies to deliver its applications. React Native, on the other hand, also runs using JavaScript (JS), but does so under the guise of orchestrating platform-specific user interface (UI) controls. Both platforms create real native apps with full native access through plugins and custom native code. React Native is a great platform with which you can build some truly incredible applications. But, the “myth” React Native offers better performance is just that, a myth. Tests done such as boot time, smooth scrolling, native transitions, code execution, CPU consumption and energy impact, should be sufficient to prove that. Ionic applications are just as fast, performant, and look and feel just like native applications.
My take? Don’t use “performance” as the reason to choose one solution over the other. Both options will give you a high-performance app with a truly native look and feel. Instead, play around with each platform and choose the one that works best for you, and is easier or more fun to play with.
My perspective
Angular is easy to step up but takes time to deliver projects since it has a steeper learning curve and uses a lot of unnecessary syntax for the simplest things, thus increasing coding time and delaying project deliveries. React takes longer to set up than Angular but lets you create projects and build apps relatively quickly. Plus, you get to add new features to React through different libraries, unlike Angular. React also lacks model and controller components, unlike Angular. So you should choose Angular framework when developing a large-scale application and React to develop single-page and cross-platform applications.
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