Angularjs Vs Reactjs — Which one rules better?

Introduction

Be it a self-governed startup or a well-established enterprise, everyone out there displays themselves online. And the what better way to be on the Internet than a website. For a smooth running website, many people opt for a JavaScript framework for development purposes. And JavaScript, being a widely popular language, has a wide spectrum of choices for great frameworks.

Major players on the front end development side include AngularJS (1.0 & 2.0), EmberJs, ReactJs, BackboneJs and many more. However, AngularJS and ReactJS share a competitive bond since the recent times. So, let’s learn more about these and figure out which one fits better.

AngularJS is an open source client side framework and it is maintained by Google. Since it is a framework, it provides everything to setup a client side website. ReactJS, on the other hand, is an open source client side library maintained by Facebook. It is V in MVC and therefore, is used for rendering views only. For model layer, the need of incorporating other libraries such as Redux/flux persists.

Though there are many topics to compare these two, we’re choosing to settle on the following points to understand better.

1) Learning Curve

AngularJS is widely known as framework with a steep learning curve as there is a lot to learn in this framework such as directives, factory, services etc. Initiating with apps featuring basic functionality is delightfully easy but building complex apps often require understanding Angular’s critical details. In such cases, lack of thorough development knowledge in AngularJS causes the work to become cumbersome.ReactJs is pretty much easy to catch up on as it allows you to learn everything about react (Views) in less than a week, as there is not too much. The points that require focus in the case of React are State, Props and View Lifecycle. Apart from this, you also have to implement the model layer as well (because react doesn’t provide any). The two major model layer are Flux and Redux. To learn one amongst these two according to the choice doesn’t require more than a week though.

2) Community Support

AngularJS initial release was in 2009. Since then, AngularJS reputation has earned a total of 50,869 stars and the number of questions tagged to its topic on Stackoverflow is 186,932.

ReactJs moved ahead with its initial release in 2013. Comparing the stars on this one we get a total stars of 46,019 and total tagged questions about it on Stackoverflow is 19,210.

In terms of development, ReactJS has elevated up to AngularJS and its community is also developing. But it will take time to be of the same size as that of AngularJS.

3) Size

Since AngularJS is a framework, it includes all the components and packs everything thus, resulting in increased app size.

On the other hand, ReactJS being a library enables people to add things or components as per the need or requirement. Due to this, the size is small compared to AngularJS.

For smaller apps a good difference can be found in terms of size, but as the app size increases, the range of this difference minimizes.

4) Performance

AngularJS have two way data binding which requires a listener on every changeable element as a result of which if there is large data then it poses a significant problem in performance.

ReactJS has a virtual DOM which track changes in the elements. When React detects a change in its virtual DOM as well as the actual DOM, then and only then it applies that change in actual DOM. Due to this feature, only a portion of DOM is re-rendered and not the whole DOM.

5) Code Re-use

AngularJS has a large community and hence, there is too much stuff which can be be used and reused.

ReactJS on the other hand has a smaller community compared to AngularJS and hence, there’s less amount of the code that is acceptable for the purpose of reuse.

Our VerdictRequirements change and so do the choice. AngularJS provides you everything so that you don’t have to find much whereas, in ReactJS, you have to look for what you need and then you have to incorporate. React is just a view in MVC while Angular is MVC itself. Therefore, there’s no such fixed judgement on what to choose between these two.

However, for better idea of choice, you should check your stage of experience in these technologies. If you’re an amateur and don’t know much about client-end, it is best to start with AngularJS. But if you hold a good amount of experience and know how things work then you can go either with AngularJS or ReactJS as per your preference.

Originally published at www.techracers.com.