The induction of web development era brought a lot of updates and language, which evidently became popular as websites and application development increased and consumers demanded more features and functionality. To deliver an excellent experience and to ease-off the development cycles newer frameworks were introduced which resulted in the formation of a renowned program known as Java. Later, Java became a factory of certain other frameworks which gave birth to Node.js, Angular.js and React.js. Amongst these, the latter two – React and Angular evolved quite quickly and became popular.
React and Angular are two of the popular lineage library and frameworks which were introduced to the developer’s world from the house of two solid competitors – Facebook and Google. We are conscious of their pedigree and respect they hold in this industry for unmatched ease in execution of code in the process of application development.
Understanding the basics – Angular and React JS
Angular – Angular is an open source application front-end development framework originally developed by Google and now supported by Google and individual community of developers. It is a full-fledged Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework or a JavaScript framework which is used by organisations, communities and developers to create dynamic applications. Angular is quite helpful as a template language in giving directives, HTML extensions and allowing to develop and re-use components in an application.
Pros of Using Angular
- Code written in Angular is completely structured and cleaner.
- It offers higher performance with more libraries and excellent error handling capabilities.
- It has material design like environment.
- Angular takes care of routing that is if you want to move from one view to another it will be easier
Cons of using Angular
- If you are a beginner then Angular can be quite difficult to understand and might appear complicated.
- Even with a robust environment as the libraries, pages and interactive elements extends, Angular sometimes face performance related issues.
- The integration with the libraries can become quite technical and difficult, especially when the developer is not familiar with them.
- Switching from an older version to a newer one is a real pain and isn’t flexible approach.
React JS – Also known as React.JS is a JavaScript library which was developed by Facebook and similar to Angular, it is also supported by a community of developers. React JS offers highly conducive settings to the developers with synergy of scalability and speed. The learning curve of React JS is quite less and with a broad array of various libraries, the framework is highly suitable for Single Page Applications and in developing user interface for web and mobile apps.
Pros of React JS
- It has an agile user interface and the component based architecture can be easily imported in the design which takes the experience, structure and development to another level.
- React JS offers flexibility with the usage of certain elements like Sign-in, Login, and Captcha buttons which are prevalent in application thus making it easier for developers to code and to debug and reuse code.
- It has code stability and one directional data bind.
- Developers don’t have to be sceptical as the compatibility works with Android and iOS.
- It also allows to use 3rd party libraries.
Cons of React JS
- If you want to integrate React in MVC framework like Rail then it is very difficult and requires complex configuration.
- The users are expected to possess in-depth knowledge as it does not include JavaScript extension syntaxes.
So which one – Angular or React?
But which is the better of two and which one can prove efficient for a small scale development or a full-fledged project. Before jumping on that, one must understand very well the ins and outs of the two most prevalent frameworks whether you are a developer, project manager or someone looking to hire a React JS or an Angular JS developer.
Developer Usage
React is a popular framework which continues to rise rapidly, gaining popularity and becoming more used than even. React is winning and extending its winning streak by years in a row.
Community Support
Overall, we are witnessing a growth trend in both of these popular frameworks when it comes to repositories and GitHub stars and counting the number of downloads. In general we can see a great support from developers and communities as developers are using both Angular and React and contributing to their repositories.
Stack Overflow questions/answers
Stack overflow is a popular platform for developers to learn, communicate and solve their coding problems. Indeed, Stack Overflow has become an important tool for developers and the number of questions asked on this platform represent an estimate number of people learning the technology, tracking interest in technology and what people are asking about.
Back in the era of JQuery the number of question were smaller but the platform has seen an extraordinary growth of the React and Angular tags. Since the year 2013, there was a sudden shift in the queries of JavaScript projects and Angular and React witnessed a fast growth.
Application Usage
When we compare Angular and React, for large applications involving video streaming applications, music streaming or instrument apps, Angular is widely used. Various companies such as YouTube, Google, Telegram, Microsoft, Autodesk, UPS, PayPal, AWS, Crunchbase, Nike, Forbes and more use Angular for their development. Whereas on the other hand, React is suitable for SPA (Single page application) or areas which don’t require enough formatting and is used by the companies such as the Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, Yahoo, Dropbox, Airbnb, Slack, Asana and more.
Summary
To simplify the problem let us summarize the Angular vs React technologies –
| Angular | React |
| Angular is a full framework | React is a library |
| Angular has a Real DOM, which is slower than the React’s Virtual DOM | React has a Virtual DOM (VDOM), which is faster than Angular’s Regular DOM |
| In Angular, the HTML and JavaScript are physically separated | React uses JSX which combines logic and markup in the same file |
| Two way data binding | One way data binding |
| Larger size which results in more loading times | Smaller size than Angular to load a bit faster |
| Must use Typescript | Can use ES6/7 JavaScript or Typescript |
| Higher learning curve | Lower learning curve |
Which one is better for you – Angular or React?
Unfortunately, there are engineers and developers who put a comparison between libraries based on their number of stars on GitHub, their popularity, total downloads and not considering the features or architecture. Even though the statistics are valuable for identification of a project both the frameworks are doing well. Indeed, if you compare the Angular and React, both programs are equally efficient and you can choose either without any trouble. JavaScript is the language most-widely accepted by the developer community all over the world for faster development process.
As a developer, which one should you choose depends upon the vigour, knowledge and comfort level. If you are better at one then it will surely cut down the development time and make it easier on the project requirements than to choose the other one. Ultimately, the verdict you should draw is that you should love the tools and enjoy working with them.