Some say comparing Angular and React is like comparing apples to oranges. Angular is a JavaScript framework built using TypeScript, while React is a JavaScript library built using JSX. Add a few libraries to React, and you can turn it into a complete framework. But the resulting stack workflow is still very different from Angular, so the comparability is limited.
On the other hand, both React and Angular have component-based architecture, resulting in both having reusable and modular elements aiming to solve similar front-end problems. And thus, there is a never-ending debate on Angular vs React in the development community.
So, which one is better? This article gives an in-depth comparison of Angular and React based on various factors to help you analyze which is best suited for your project.
Pixel Genesys is a leading web app development services provider building futuristic, scalable applications using modern frameworks and the right tech stack. If you are wondering about technologies to choose from, connect with our development experts to discuss your project dimensions.
What is Angular?
Angular is a development platform and application-design framework built on TypeScript with component-based architecture for building scalable web apps. It has a collection of well-integrated libraries and features, such as client-server communication, routing, and more, that help speed up front-end development. It also has a suite of developer tools to develop and scale projects from single-developer size to enterprise-grade applications.
Angular is a complete rewrite of AngularJS (no longer maintained) from the same Google engineers’ team. However, Angular is constantly updated and is backed by a massive community of developers.
Distinctive Features of Angular:
- Two-way data binding
- Dependency injection
- Virtual scrolling
- Angular CLI
- Built-in libraries
Advantages of Angular:
- Strong encapsulation and an intuitive application structure
- Clean code development
- Ease in building, maintaining, testing, and updating
- In-built features like RxJS and AngularCLI
- Built-in support for HTTP, AJAX, and Observables
- Rapid rendering of server-side
- Support for views that lack browser-side rendering
- Fewer lines of code required due to parallelly running components
- Improved developer productivity
- Increased overall performance of the application
What is React?
React is an open-source JavaScript library for front-end development to build UI components. Its component-based architecture and declarative views let developers create interactive and complex UIs easily. Developers can build fast and scalable apps for all platforms with its “learn once, write anywhere” principle. It is managed by Facebook’s React team and a vast development community.
Distinctive Features of React:
- Declarative views
- JSX advantage
- Virtual DOM
- One-way data binding
- Building blocks flexibility
Advantages of React:
- Reusable and more predictable code
- Easier debugging with declarative views
- Faster development time
- Enhanced developer productivity
- Easy migration between different versions
- Support for mobile app development with React Native
- Faster updates with both server-side and front-end support
- Improved load time and performance with efficiently built UI
- Integration with third-party libraries
Angular vs. React: A Quick Comparison
React and Angular are popular JS frameworks for building complex and interactive web applications. While they share several similarities, some distinct characteristics make them fundamentally different. Let’s compare the two frameworks briefly before discussing the technical aspects in detail.
| Feature | Angular | React |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Full-fledged structural framework | JavaScript-based library |
| Purpose | Develop dynamic web apps | Build interactive UI components |
| Language | TypeScript | JavaScript (JSX script) |
| Developed and maintained by | Meta and community | |
| Front-end development approach | Extends the functionality of HTML, prefers client-side rendering | Uses XML-like syntax called JSX, slight preference for server-side rendering |
| DOM | Real | Virtual |
| Performance | High | Relatively high (since virtual DOM renders updates much faster & ensures fast runtime performance) |
| Dynamic UI binding | UI binding at plain object or property level | Direct linking of states to the UI |
| App structure | Fixed and complex platform, component-based framework | Flexible, component-based |
| Data binding | Two-way | One-way |
| Dependency injection | Supports dependency injection, allowing for separate lifecycles for different stores | Does not fully enable dependency injection, because each component has its own global state |
| Learning curve | Can be steep for beginners | Relatively small |
| GitHub stars | 86.7k | 203k |
| Ideal use cases | Develop complex enterprise apps, progressive and single-page web apps and websites | Modern and large web apps with frequently variable data, natively-rendered hybrid apps for Android and iOS devices |
Detailed Comparison: Angular vs React
Popularity: Angular vs React
Both frameworks have gained popularity in discussion forums and the developers’ community. But which is more popular? While looking at popular stats, Angular has 86.7k stars, and React has 203k stars on GitHub. And according to a Statista survey in 2022 on the most used web frameworks worldwide, React secured the second spot while Angular was in the fifth spot.
Angular:
Since its initial release as AngularJS in the early 2010s, it gained a lot of popularity, especially for building single-page applications. Thus, it is a mature framework.
In 2016, Angular 2 was released, a complete redesign of AngularJS, with many new features and improvements. Since then, Angular has continued to evolve and improve with new releases and remains a popular choice for building web apps. However, competition from other JS frameworks and libraries like Vue.js (a progressive framework) and React has affected its popularity.
React:
React is the clear winner here as it has always maintained more popularity on average than Angular. It gives the advantage of rendering optimizations, virtual DOM, and easy migration between versions. Moreover, it has the simplest ways to reuse the UI components, offering an easy way to get tasks done. All these and more features of React have made it the go-to JS front-end framework for dynamic web applications.
Performance: Angular vs React
Both frameworks have distinct abilities to build high-performing web apps. But which is faster? While React has quite a good reputation for boosting performance, Angular isn’t lagging anywhere in the competition.
Angular: Angular has everything to optimize coding practices and leads to an established level of programming that continually enhances performance. For example, optimizing the digest cycle for your proposed code structure is easier with Angular. While you develop the codebase for further modules, monitoring and optimizing the loop can verify the previously assessed changes.
Also, projects that don’t need two-way data binding can be served with older versions of Angular to reduce complexities to a noticeable extent. Moreover, Angular offers $cacheFactory that works better for memorization and can eventually be used for recalculating the data being calculated later. And in terms of rendering of pages, Angular uses real DOM but has a unique mechanism of change detection combined with zones that makes web apps faster.
React: React boasts of a virtual DOM, one of its most sought-after features for application performance. It allows front-end developers to make changes without having to rewrite the full HTML document. This ensures speedier performance by rendering updates faster and refreshing data faster on web pages.
The reusability of components is another aspect of React that gives it a competitive edge. It can be a critical issue when your developers working on different projects are dealing with complex logic and cannot reuse it again in the projects. React can solve this issue by allowing developers to reuse system components.
Reusing React components is also common among designers since it doubles the productivity and optimizes coding practices – starting from the finest components like the checkbox and the button, moving to the wrapper components, and reaching the root components. Such practices ultimately lead to consistent app performance and facilitate code quality and maintenance regardless of the project’s complexity.
Data binding: Angular vs React
The biggest difference between Angular and React lies in state management. React depends more on state management libraries such as Helmet and React Router. Angular has built-in data-binding, whereas Redux library usually augments React to provide unidirectional data flow and work with immutable data.
Angular: Angular uses two-way data binding, meaning that the model state changes automatically whenever any interface element changes. This keeps the two layers updated with the same data.
Angular binds the HTML element to the model variable and not just displays it but also changes it in the backend. It helps coordinate the two data models of a framework, which helps create an interactive user interface without the programmer’s intervention of several callbacks and extra efforts.
Two-way data binding is the most efficient technique for fetching data from large ERP-based software like medical software, accounting, and other software that demands highly complex requirements. Thus, Angular’s bidirectional nature makes it easy to build ERP software.
React: React uses one-way data binding, which renders the modifications in the interface model only after the model state has been updated first. And whenever the UI components get changed, the model state remains the same without any changes. This unidirectional data flow gives React developers more control over the web and mobile apps.
React library does not follow the automatic approach to data binding and lets developers fall into the nitty-gritty of complex handling of objects. However, it uses one-way data binding with two-way data binding helpers to manage heavy parsing work and extensive data manipulation.
Code quality and maintainability: Angular vs React
Angular: At Pixel Genesys, we leverage tools like AngularCLI to scaffold, build, and maintain high-performing Angular applications. Moreover, integrations like Angular Core, Angular Material, etc. have made our Angular project deliveries more effective and code quality better.
AngularCLI reduces the learning curve and also allows Angular developers to predict compilation behavior. It generates smooth builds and reduces the iterating efforts of developers, which usually leads to bad code quality in the end.
Angular resolves maintainability problems by enabling modular and maintainable JavaScript code. It provides an HTML extension to deal with such problems, and as a result, saves a lot of precious development hours.
React: React has many aspects that not only increase code quality but give it an identity that is different from all other web frameworks. For instance, using Display Name string to debug the messages will let you distinguish the components. Moreover, developers can focus on modern JavaScript and worry less about framework-specific code.
Maintaining code quality in React is easy because of the code review practices it allows by providing Linters. It helps in generating identical coding practices among the developers in an organization since Linters follow a strict set of rules that keep the codebase consistent.
React doesn’t let developers write code in splits, making it super usable and intelligible for other developers. Since it facilitates building custom React components, it is easy to render the uncontrolled input fields and recognize the components easily with unique naming conventions.
Server-side rendering: Angular vs React
Angular: With server-side rendering, Angular renders the application by creating a static view before it gets fully interactive. It is up to you how cleverly you use the combination of JSON and client-side caching to increase server-side performance. Nothing beats Angular when it comes to reducing the traffic between client and server.
React: To make your application SEO-friendly, you would need to render the application to the server. React does it with ease with the help of some specific functions. You can do it by calling the Render To String function instead of calling Render. Unlike other JavaScript frameworks, React is not that rigid a library and offers substantial flexibility.
Alternatively, you can also use render To Static Markup to avoid creating DOM attributes such as data-react-id, which is useful for creating a simple static page generator. The most prominent example of a React application is Facebook, with super high-speed rendering and better functions even at a mediocre internet connection.
Testing in Angular vs React
Angular: Testing in a dynamically typed language like JavaScript makes achieving 100% of testing goals difficult. That is why code written in JavaScript has to undergo a strong set of tests. Angular has multiple features, such as isolation of the unit code, and is written with all the concerns keeping testability in mind.
For instance, the in-built Angular feature, i.e., dependency injection, makes it easy to decouple components for testing and mocking.
While Angular provides testing and debugging for an entire app project with a single tool, React requires a set of tools to perform different types of testing.
React: While writing tests, mocking the parts that do not already exist in the testing environments is preferable. Tests can spy on the other parts of the function and predict their interactions with them. This process helps in avoiding flakiness in data fetching.
React executes test suites continuously to run test cases as a part of the development process. It also offers test runners like Mocha, Ava, and Jest that are capable of running tests while already running the development process.
Optimizing the Bundle Size: Angular vs React
The file that must be downloaded during the initial page load is the bundle file. The larger the bundle file size, the longer it takes for browsers to load a webpage. Optimizing it as much as possible is crucial, as it can significantly impact an application’s performance.
Angular: Angular applications require a compilation process to run in a browser because browsers do not directly understand Angular’s components and templates. The compiler acts as a bridge between the browser and the code in the bundle file. However, an increase in bundle file size can affect loading times and reduce performance.
To enhance rendering speed, Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation can be used as part of the workflow. While it isn’t Angular’s default option, it can be activated through the CLI by switching to production mode. AOT compiles Angular HTML and TypeScript code into efficient JavaScript during the build phase, reducing the workload for browsers.
React: Bundle file size is particularly crucial for large-scale applications. Overlooking the bundle size in React can become problematic as the application expands.
Initially, an application may consist of a few components, but as new pages and features are added, the bundle size grows. To optimize this, code-splitting and compression techniques can be used without compromising performance. For an in-depth guide on optimizing React bundle size, you can explore various best practices for improving application efficiency.
Learning Curve: Angular vs React
Angular: Angular is vast and dynamic, requiring developers to learn various concepts, including directives, modules, components, services, and dependency injections. The initial learning curve is steep, but once mastered, Angular provides a structured and efficient development experience.
For large-scale applications, Angular excels at solving complex development challenges, making it a preferred choice for enterprise solutions.
React: React focuses on simplicity, requiring developers to learn fundamental concepts such as writing components, managing state, and utilizing props for configuration. The learning curve is relatively lower than Angular’s since React does not enforce strict architectural patterns. By mastering state management and routing libraries, developers can quickly start building scalable applications.
Both Angular and React provide extensive tools and features, making it challenging to choose between them. The decision should be based on project requirements and team expertise.
Angular vs. React: When to Choose Which?
Angular: Angular accelerates front-end development and is a standalone solution for building fast, data-driven web applications. With Google maintaining Angular, it offers stability and extensive community support. Ideal use cases for Angular include:
- Designing, maintaining, and scaling large, complex applications
- Developing feature-rich UI elements and customizations
- Building enterprise-scale and mid-level projects that do not require extensive third-party integrations
Angular is an excellent choice for:
- Developing feature-rich, enterprise-grade applications
- Applications with medium-to-high complexity
- Teams with experience in C#, Java, or previous Angular versions
- Applications such as video streaming, e-commerce platforms, real-time data apps, and content-heavy platforms. Notable companies like Forbes and Upwork utilize Angular for handling complex web pages.
React: React is primarily used for managing an application’s view layer, allowing developers to create reusable UI components. It is fast and scalable, enabling smooth data updates without requiring full-page reloads. Originally developed for Facebook, React now powers Instagram’s news feed and various large-scale applications.
Ideal use cases for React include:
- Social networking applications
- Data visualization tools and dashboards
- Retail and e-commerce platforms
- Applications requiring real-time updates and high user interaction
React is a suitable choice when:
- You need customized or personalized app solutions
- The application involves multiple dynamic events
- The development team is proficient in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
- You aim to develop cross-platform mobile applications
Case Study: Angular vs React in Major Applications
Both Angular and React have been instrumental in powering applications for some of the world’s leading companies. Here are a few well-known brands leveraging these technologies:
- Angular: Used by Google, Forbes, Upwork, and Microsoft for scalable enterprise applications.
- React: Adopted by Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb, and Netflix for building interactive and performance-driven user experiences.
Which is Better?
Both Angular and React are excellent choices for modern web and mobile application development. The decision depends on project needs, developer expertise, and application scale.
- React is a simpler option for developers looking to build fast, component-based applications without complex architecture.
- Angular provides a comprehensive solution for large-scale, enterprise-grade applications that require a structured approach.
React is often preferred for smaller teams due to its ease of use and flexibility. However, Angular is ideal for extensive development teams working on complex applications requiring high scalability.
Pixel Genesys offers top-performing extended teams to meet all your development needs across any technology. Let us know how we can assist you in building high-performance applications.
