JavaScript has a lot of great frameworks that are developing at a very fast pace. Of course, this means that today we often update versions of Angular, React.
But in order to understand which of these is actually more beneficial and convenient to use, we decided to share the main advantages and disadvantages of each framework and help developers choose the best one to use.
What is Angular?
Angular aka Angular 2.0 is a development platform released by Google in 2016. The first version of the framework is called AngularJS, but it has some fundamental differences compared to later versions.
For example, AngularJS uses only JavaScript, while its successor provides support for both JS and TypeScript. AngularJS was a JavaScript MVVM environment. It was founded in 2009.
In fact, it is just great for creating interactive web applications. Angular has a lot of advantages. Here are some of benefits of angular:
Angular is used in conjunction with Typescript. It has exceptional support for this.
New features like Angular generation Angular using npm libraries from the CLI, generation, and component development using Angular. Introducing component dependencies related to modules and modularity in general. A structure and architecture specifically designed for great project scalability.
What is React?
React is a JavaScript library developed by Facebook in 2013. To simplify what is react, the development process, the developers included a number of innovations.
For example, they were among the first to use component-oriented architecture, namely the division of project design into logical and functional components.
The community liked this architecture so much that Google specialists added it to Angular2 as well. It's great for creating modern one-page applications of any size and scale.
Here are some of the benefits of using React:
- Very fast, thanks to React Virtual DOM implementation and various rendering optimizations.
- First-class Progressive Web App (PWA) support thanks to the create-react-app generator.
- Excellent server-side rendering support, making it a powerful platform for content-oriented applications.
Angular vs. React: A quick comparison
First of all, let's grasp the basic meaning of these development environments. Angular is a comprehensive framework. In other words, "out of the box" it gives a complete application architecture and also includes a number of miniature libraries for specific tasks.
Whereas React is a library technology, that is, it contains only the components of the user interface.
Popularity: Angular vs React
JavaScript frameworks have grown in popularity over the past few years. Angular and React are two of the most popular, and they have been adopted by developers and enterprises alike.
Both frameworks are widely used in enterprises: according to the 2018 annual Stack Overflow developer survey, Angular ranked third behind JavaScript and TypeScript. React ranked fifth, ahead of CSS preprocessors such as Sass or Less, but behind TypeScript (which ranked fourth).
So, angular versus react - they are two of the most popular JavaScript frameworks for building Web applications.
There are many companies that use both frameworks for their projects because they allow them to develop websites quickly and efficiently while providing quality results for customers.
Performance: Angular vs React
For some time now there has been a struggle between react vs angular. Developers are trying to figure out which one is better for their projects. In this article we look at how the two frameworks compare in terms of performance, scalability, and resource usage.
React primarily provides virtual DOM, while Angular provides incremental DOM.
The incremental DOM stores the canonical representation of the DOM. This keeps extra memory out of the process, which makes a difference for memory-constrained devices. Consequently, Angular applications benefit from less memory consumption, while React is better in terms of performance.
However, incremental DOM is still capable of delivering speeds of over 60 frames per second, which means that for the average user the performance difference between angular and react will not be noticeable.
Angular provides full architecture and MVC. The framework is great for manipulating large amounts of data and reduces the likelihood of problems related to poorly prepared architecture.
Data binding: Angular vs React
In Angular, one-way data binding is used to synchronize data between a view component and a model component. This means that any changes made to one component are automatically propagated to the other.
This allows events and user interaction to be handled by updating a single truth source rather than updating multiple truth sources with each change.
React does data binding differently. It uses two-way binding via properties or state. This means that any changes made to one component are immediately propagated to both components, so they can update their views accordingly without having to monitor events or user interaction.
This also allows for clearer communication between view components and model components, because you know exactly which property is updated when an event occurs or how many times you need to update something if there are multiple instances of that object on the screen at the same time (for example, multiple buttons).
Code quality and maintainability: Angular vs React
Angular and React are great frameworks for web application development and SPA. But when it comes to code quality and maintainability, there is a key difference between react and angular.
Angular is a great choice for large-scale applications that need to be built quickly, with a strong focus on performance. It has a steep learning curve, but once you master it, you can easily create high-performance applications. Angular is a very powerful framework that helps you write clean, maintainable code.
It's easy to learn and use, and it's built on TypeScript, which allows you to write your own JavaScript code, which is more stable and secure.
React is best for small applications that need to be built quickly. It has a much smaller learning curve than Angular and offers more flexibility than its counterpart - you can create everything from simple pages to complex user interfaces without first learning the syntax or architecture of another framework.
React is also easy to learn and use, but it has a few significant drawbacks: it's not as secure as Angular; its learning curve is very steep; and if you want to write your own JavaScript code in React, you have to do it outside the framework.
Both frameworks offer great tools for testing and debugging code for testing JavaScript, and for debugging asynchronous actions or side-effects in your application.
Server-side rendering: Angular vs React
The biggest difference between angular vs react is how the rendering is done on the server. Whereas in Angular the template syntax is compiled into HTML before being sent to the client, in React templates are not compiled.
The disadvantage of compiling templates before submitting them is that you have less flexibility when it comes to what types of data you need to render components (since both Angular and React use JavaScript for their templates).
You also have no control over the amount of data passed from parent components, since each component must include all of its dependencies in itself, rather than passing them from external sources such as services or global variables (which would happen if you were using a different template language).
Server-side rendering is the process of sending HTML to the user's browser before JavaScript is executed on the page.
Testing in Angular vs React
React has a specific set of tools to perform different types of testing. In the case of Angular, testing and debugging of the whole project is possible with a single tool - Protractor. It allows you to test specific elements without any configuration effort.
Angular uses TestBed, which is designed to simplify component testing, while React uses something called Enzyme to test components.
TestBed is a standard API that allows you to create items in tests and then manipulate them. This can be useful if you want to test the behavior of components that have dependencies on other elements, such as directives or services.
Enzyme, on the other hand, allows you to select elements in your application and perform operations on them, such as clicking buttons or entering text into fields.
It also allows you to perform operations on child elements, such as adding attributes or removing them from the element's DOM tree.
Optimizing the bundle size: Angular vs React
Actually, if you think about how angular works and how react works - they have similar approaches to batching, but the Angular approach is more efficient.
The reason for this is the way Angular compiles its files into one package - it only includes what you need in the package, whereas React includes all of its dependencies, even if you don't use them.
Both frameworks have tools to reduce package size. In Angular, you can use the AOT compiler to precompile your code before deployment.
This can significantly reduce file size by eliminating dead code (code that will never be used). There are several ways to optimize code size in React, including using the Webpack Uglify Plugin or RollupJS Tree Shaking.
The key difference between angular vs react these approaches is that Angular's AOT compiler removes dead code before compiling anything into JSX; whereas Webpack Uglify Plugin and RollupJS Tree Shaking remove dead code after compiling everything into JSX.
Learning curve: Angular vs React
Both frameworks offer many resources for developers looking for ways to get started with them: Angular has an official site with a getting started guide, which is also available as a series of video tutorials on YouTube; React has an official site with documentation and resources for beginners, including a getting started guide.
The learning curve for angular or react is relatively high, which is not surprising given their complexity. However, both frameworks have extensive documentation and a large community of developers ready to help newcomers.
For example, Angular has an official guide to building an application from scratch called Angular by Example.
The official React documentation is also quite detailed, with several examples of component creation. Both frameworks offer online courses that can be purchased online or watched for free on YouTube.
In addition, both frameworks have their own version control systems (GitHub and BitBucket for react or angular), where you can find open-source projects created by other users who are willing to share them with the community.
What is Angular Used For?
Full-featured platform - gives a clear idea of what is angular and how an application should be designed and also includes a number of tiny libraries. Supports both one-way and two-way data binding.
For small products development in Angular will cost more, but will not bring obvious benefits. It includes a number of Material UI components that simplify UI customization. Incremental DOM - When a new DOM is created, it compares it to the previous DOM and applies the differences to the "actual" DOM, allocating memory only when necessary.
That is what is angular used for.
What is React Used For?
The library deals only with user interface components. So what is react used for? The MVC design requires a Flux implementation, but it gives more flexibility in organizing the code.
Community-developed UI tools provide a wide range of components with the ability to customize them. Great for applications of any size and complexity!
Virtual DOM - Every time the DOM changes, a new virtual DOM is created compared to the previous one, and only the differences in the "real" DOM are updated.
One-way data binding means that the UI element cannot affect the state of the component!
Angular vs React: Which is Better?
Advantages of Angular
One-way data binding, which provides exceptional application behavior that minimizes the risk of possible errors.
MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel), which allows developers to work separately on the same section of an application using the same data set.
Introducing component dependencies related to modules and modularity in general. A structure and architecture specifically designed for great project scalability.
Disadvantages of Angular
Relatively slow performance, given the different metrics. On the other hand, this can easily be solved by using the so-called "ChangeDetectionStrategy", which helps to manually control the rendering process of components.
The variety of different structures (Injectables, Components, Pipes, Modules, etc.) makes it difficult to learn compared to React.
Advantages of React
The main advantages of react over angular are:
- Excellent support for server-side rendering, making it a powerful platform for content-oriented applications.
- The next advantages of react are first-class Progressive Web App (PWA) support thanks to the `create-react-app' generator.
- Data binding is one-way, which means fewer unwanted side effects.
- Another benefits of react are that it is easy to learn, thanks to a simple design, the use of JSX for templates, and very detailed documentation.
Disadvantages of React
Mixing templates with logic can be confusing to some developers when first getting to know React. The community is divided by the way CSS is written in React, which is divided into traditional style sheets and CSS-in-JS.
React is moving away from class-based components, which can be an obstacle for developers who are more comfortable with object-oriented programming.
Conclusion: Which is Better?
First of all, you have to proceed from what is a priority for the business. React gives you the freedom to choose the tools, architecture, and libraries you want to develop your application.
It's also easier and more profitable to find developers for it. So what is the difference between angular and react once again?
One of the major differences in the way Angular and React are developed is that Angular is a framework and React is a library. This means that if you use React to build applications, you will need to include additional libraries such as react-dom and react-redux.
On the other hand, if you think of why use angular for your application, you won't need other libraries because it comes with its own set of tools and resources.
