Angular vs React: Which one to choose in 2024?

What is Angular?

The origins of Angular can be traced back to 2010. It was initially known as AngularJS, and it was a Google-developed and maintained web framework. Within no time, it gained popularity and became one of the most popular web frameworks at the time.

Angular is a component-based framework that allows you to create scalable mobile and web applications. It has a wide range of integrated libraries and components, such as client-server communication, routing, and more, making it a complete angular framework. It comes with a set of developer tools that can be used to create and scale projects ranging from single-developer to enterprise-grade applications. Angular is a typescript-based development platform that results in a seamless experience.

Key Features of Angular

• TypeScript offers efficiency. It has built-in support for HTTP, AJAX, and Observables.
• It has vast community support.
• It is technology-consistent.
• It provides cleaner and crisper coding.
• It offers better support for error handling.

What is React?

React is a Facebook-used JavaScript library that was open-sourced in 2013. This framework popularized a web development concept known as component-based architecture with several benefits. For web and mobile apps, React is used to manage the view layer. We can also make reusable user interface components with React.

React is used for building user interfaces or UI components. Its component-based and declarative traits let developers create interactive and complex UIs easily. As React works on learning once and writes anywhere principle, Developers can make fast and scalable applications using it. React is managed by Facebook and a community of individual developers and communities.

Key Features of React

• It lets you use third-party libraries.
• It is simple and composable.
• It is time-saving.
• Facebook fully supports it.
• It provides a better user experience and faster performance.
• It serves speedier development.
• It gives code stability with one-directional data binding.

This was all about knowing about them individually; let’s look at Angular vs React and which one should you choose.

React vs. Angular

When deciding which framework to use, it’s a good idea to consider the factors that make them popular. The more community support it has, the faster it can find solutions to problems that arise.

Another essential factor to consider when deciding between react and angular is npm (Node Package Manager) downloads. The difference between Angular and React.js is that Angular uses both a one – and two-way data binding approach(Changing data impacts view and changing view that triggers data change). In comparison, React uses a one-way binding approach. When designing a React app, it’s common for developers to nest child components within higher-order parent components.

One-way binding makes the code more stable, and debugging an app built with react vs. angular app is much more manageable. Still, Angular’s one/two-way binding is simpler to work with and makes the framework more flexible.

React vs. Angular Pros and Cons

Advantages of Angular

Below are some of the benefits of Angular:

• It provides high performance.
• It offers clean code development.
• It has a material design-like interface.
• It provides seamless updates using Angular CLI.
• It takes care of routing.

Disadvantages of Angular

Below are some cons of Angular-

• It may not seem very clear to newcomers.
• It has no clear manual and extensive, all-inclusive documentation.
• It has a steep learning curve.
• Angular, at times, becomes slow with pages embedding interactive elements.
• Its scopes are hard to debug with limited routing.
• Third-party integration is very tough.
• You may face several issues while switching from older versions to newer ones.

Advantages of React

Here are some of the benefits of React:

• React’s simple design makes it easier to learn.
• Developers can spend more time writing modern JavaScript frameworks with minimum worry about the framework-specific code.
• Its HTML-like syntax helps you with templating and highly detailed documentation.
• The enhanced support for server-side rendering makes it a robust framework for content-focused applications.
• React is synced with a library like ReactDOM, eliminating manual updating, and making it faster than any other framework or library.
• You can easily migrate between the versions.
• Facebook’s “Codemod” feature automates much of the process.
• You can apply skills learned from React to Native development.
• ReactJS can easily manage heavy loads by combining them with ES6/7.

Disadvantages of React

React has some cons too. Here are they-

• It requires a complex configuration to integrate React into the traditional MVC framework.
• Users must have in-depth knowledge of the integration of the user interface into the MVC framework.

To help you make an informed decision when choosing between Angular vs React, we’ve compiled a list of comparisons that should assist you in making the best decision.

A Quick Comparison: React vs. Angular

To make things simple, we’ve compiled a list of comparisons that should assist you in making the best decision. Here’s the full comparison for Angular vs React –

Detailed comparison of Angular and React

Angular vs React: Purpose

As mentioned earlier, the Angular framework is a full-featured software development framework. Since Angular’s package includes functions such as data binding, project generation, component-based routing, dependency injection, and form validation, it usually does not require additional libraries. Furthermore, Angular has a strong opinion about the application’s structure. Also, it offers a variety of built-in small libraries, which are particularly useful when building complex applications.

React, on the other hand, is a framework for UI development. React apps require additional libraries to be implemented. As a result, React gives more freedom to organize the code as one sees fit. However, it is primarily concerned with View on MVC architecture and requires Flux to implement it.

Angular vs React: Performance

Angular has historically been slower than React when it comes to complex and dynamic web applications. This is mainly due to Angular two-way data binding, which assigns a watcher to each binding to keep track of changes in the DOM. A larger number of bindings creates more watchers, which results in a slower app.

In React.js website development, a one-way data binding is used so that no watches are created for the bindings, resulting in fast app performance. In addition, React uses virtual DOM, which aids in faster updating and rendering compared to Angular’s real DOM.

In the Angular vs React debate, React’s performance advantage has diminished significantly as a result of recent updates to Angular. In later versions of Angular, you can choose between one-way and two-way data binding. Apps made with Angular are also slightly smaller than those made with React.

Angular vs React: Development Tools & Testing

Angular and React are equal in terms of tools. With tools such as Visual Studio and Sublime Text, you can bootstrap a project in both technologies.

However, Angular outperforms React when it comes to testing. Angular apps can be fully tested using Jasmine, Karma, and Protractor. Testing a React app inside out requires several tools, such as Jest for JavaScript, Enzyme for components, and React-unit for units.

In comparison with Angular, React’s developer tools are vast and varied, but the testing process is longer.

Angular vs React: SEO

A server-side rendering is universally acknowledged to be better for SEO than a client-side rendering. Because both Angular and React support server-side rendering, they should be on an equal footing. As it turns out, things aren’t quite so straightforward in practice.

Angular might require additional tools and coding to implement server-side rendering, while React does not. If SEO-friendliness is an important criterion for web development, Reactjs remains a better choice than Angular.

Angular vs React: Learning curve

Due to its sheer size and complexity, Angular has a steep learning curve. In addition, it uses a complex component management system and a complicated programming language (TypeScript). Additionally, Angular offers multiple ways to solve a problem, which can be confusing to new developers and those used to fixed approaches. In addition, Angular is constantly updated, keeping you and your web developers on your toes.

Reactjs website development, on the other hand, is easier to learn, especially if you are familiar with JavaScript. It is, however, necessary to spend a bit more time learning libraries like Redux, which is used for state management in most React apps. Despite React’s frequent updates, established best practices mitigate its effect.

Angular vs React: Language

Angular supports TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript and a statically typed language. Typos are easier to find and the code is easier to navigate in TypeScript.

React can be written in JavaScript ES6+ combined with JSX script, which is a syntax extension that makes JavaScript code identical to HTML code. A code translation tool (e.g. Babel) is needed to compile the JSX code in a browser. Furthermore, React can also be written in TypeScript, but it is not included by default.

Angular vs React: UI components

Angular provides a variety of material design components, including layouts, buttons, pop-ups, etc. These components simplify and speed up UI configuration.

To use the material design components available in React, Material-UI Library & Dependencies must be installed. It offers a wide range of UI components, both free and paid.

Angular vs React: Ease of update

By using the Angular CLI, you can easily upgrade your application to the newest Angular version by using commands such as ng update. It greatly simplifies the process of developing Angularjs applications. Moreover, most of the update process is automated, which further streamlines it.

React, on the other hand, is a front-end library that provides developers with a smooth transition from one version to another. In spite of this, front-end development libraries heavily rely on the third-party libraries for updating and migrating.

Developers should also verify that third-party libraries they are using are compatible with newer versions of the JavaScript framework.

Angular vs React: Popularity, and community support

A framework’s popularity is an important factor to consider when selecting one for web development. As per StackOverflow Survey, React is the favorite framework of 40.58% of developers in 2023 as compared to 40.14% in 2023, Angular with 17.46% of developers in 2023 as compared to 22.96% of developers in 2022.

Most popular languages of 2023

Source: Stack Overflow Survey 2023

Source: Stack Overflow Survey 2022

According to the Stackoverflow 2023 survey, 40.58% of respondents prefer React, while 17.46% prefer Angular. Angular is also considered the most dreaded web framework despite being one of the most popular. There are actually more questions tagged with Angular than its rival. This might be explained by the fact that Angular is generally considered more complex than React.

Let’s examine how Angular and React differ and the data that shows how popular each framework has become over time.

Any unexpected problem can be quickly solved with the help of a larger, more active community of developers. Angular has nearly 888.1k stars on Github compared to React’s 207k. As both remain on top of the most starred repositories, they clearly have a very large community behind them.

Now let’s compare the hiring trends between React and Angular.

Source: Hacker News Tech Tools Trends

The above chart shows that Angular had a larger job market than React until 2015. Angular was a mature framework at the time, while React was still a new technology. Recently, React has overtaken Angular due to its popularity.
This can be understood by the below-mentioned factors:

1. Developers became more dominant as React became older.
2. Considering the less complexity of React, it has a shorter ramp-up time than Angular.
3. Startup owners prefer React for its shorter development time.

Among web developers and companies, both are popular, but React is the more popular one.

Final call: Which is best?

• Due to TypeScript’s statically typed nature, Angular allows you to detect errors at compile time, instead of at runtime (as JavaScript does).
• Angular is generally preferred by programmers who come from statically typed languages since TypeScript allows you to have explicit types in your code.
• The two-way data binding of Angular ensures that data is always in sync, in contrast to the one-way data binding of React.
• There is a much shorter ramp-up time with React due to its easier learning curve.
• Angular offers a better cross-platform mobile framework solution than React.
• When using React, you are able to have a stronger opinion about how the code should be organized.

React is considered as the best option by most developers because of its simplicity. Also, it is easy to learn and to work with. It also makes the transition to component-based architecture a lot easier for newcomers. Angular, on the other hand, is better for complex and longer projects since it allows you to have explicit types and detect errors in compile time, while React is best for a dynamic, cross-platform application.

Conclusion

From the above React vs. Angular comparison, you would have the idea that both Angular and React are fantastic tools. Each framework is distinct in its own way. It is entirely up to you to make this decision. However, we have to come to a conclusion and select any one of them.

Small businesses prefer React, whereas large development teams prefer Angular when developing an enterprise-grade application. React is a simple way to get the task done because it doesn’t have much to do with organizing HTML and instead focuses on the simplest ways to reuse UI components. In comparison, Angular is capable of handling multiple tasks without the need for external assistance. However, the advantages outweigh the time investment in the more extended concept.

You can get the help of a custom web development company to choose the best framework for your project. OpenXcell provides tailored web application development solutions specifically designed for your business to bring out the best results. Having worked with both technologies extensively for 14+ years, we have helped startups reach new heights with exceptional web solutions. Let’s discuss your idea.

FAQ's Angular and React

What is the difference between Angular and React?

Angular is a framework, whereas React is a library. Use cases are the main difference between the two. A large-scale enterprise-grade project is best done with Angular, while a dynamic, cross-platform application is best done with React.

Angular or React, which is better?

React outperforms Angular when it comes to performance, bundle size, and backward compatibility. React’s component-driven architecture lets developers reuse components, which saves them time and money.

Is Angular better than React?

Ultimately, it depends on your project’s needs and requirements. Although Angular may be preferred by some developers for certain types of projects, such as enterprise applications. As a powerful and widely used library, React offers a more flexible and customizable approach to development. In the end, Angular and React should be selected based on project scope, team expertise, and development goals.

Why is React faster than Angular?

Apps written in React.js utilize a virtual DOM, which reduces the need to rewrite HTML documents. As a result, updates are rendered faster, ensuring faster performance.