An age-old rivalry between Angular vs Reacts back once again with new facts and information. In order to develop first-rate applications, developers often get confused pertaining to the selection of technology. Before making the final decision, we advise you to consider all the parameters and compare the features of Angular vs React with respect to the requirements of your application.
In this blog, we are presenting a detailed comparison between Angular and React with the intent to help you make an informed decision.
Introduction To Angular
AngularJS is a JavaScript-based open-source frontend development framework. It provides an easy way to create dynamic web apps that work across all major browsers and platforms, including mobile and desktop.
It allows developers to build single-page applications with the help of directives, controllers, and services. At its core, AngularJS is an MVC framework that uses HTML as the view layer and JavaScript as the controllers and data-binding layer.
AngularJS supports a rich set of directives that can be used to organise and control the content within an application.
AngularJS has an event-driven programming model which eases the development of single-page application development. The framework data binding lets the application respond to and update its views based on the user’s input without requiring any page reloads.
Features of Angular
Following are the features of Angular that attract frontend developers:
- Data binding
- Dependency injection
- Directives are custom HTML tags that run on the server or in the browser
- Services that provide reusable functionality to your apps, such as authentication or logging
Advantages of Angular
Below is the list of advantages of Angularjs
- Angular is an open-source project, which means that it’s free and available to all developers
- Angular is built on top of proven technologies such as JavaScript and TypeScript, which are already widely used in the industry
- Angular provides extensive support for modern web standards like HTML5, CSS3 and Web Components
- Angular has extensive support for unit testing out-of-the-box with Jasmine and Karma test runners
- Angular has a rich ecosystem of tools, including a large collection of open-source packages
Disadvantages of Angular
Following are the disadvantages of Angularjs
- Uses a lot of dependencies which can make debugging difficult.
- Doesn’t support older browsers and doesn’t have any good documentation to help beginners get started with Angular development.
- It also does not provide native support for many desktop or mobile platforms.
- Its learning curve can be steep, especially if you have never used any other frontend frameworks before
Introduction To Reactjs
Reactjs is a JavaScript library used for developing frontend web and mobile applications. It allows developers to build interactive UIs that are rendered in real-time with a single codebase and provides an easy way to build interactive UIs with just a few lines of code.
It comes with an ecosystem of ready-to-use components that can be customised and reused across projects, which is one of the reasons why it has been used by Facebook, Netflix, Instagram, Airbnb, and many more giant tech companies of the world.
The idea is that you can create your own component without having to worry about the underlying framework or any other technology. It also makes it easier for developers to focus on developing rather than spending time on technologies.
Features of Reactjs
Following is the list of features of Reactjs:
- The DOM is mutable, and changes are only made to the virtual DOM when they are updated (rendering happens fast).
- React is not tied to any specific framework and can be used with any framework or library
- Reusable components and stateful components
- Easily share data between different components
- Isomorphic rendering where your website works well on both desktop and mobile devices
Advantages of Reactjs
Following are the advantages of Reactjs:
- Reusability: Reactjs provides a declarative API that allows you to create components that are reusable across multiple projects with no effort required
- Performance: The framework is fast as it makes use of virtual DOM rendering instead of heavy DOM manipulation
- Simplicity: The API is easy to learn, and the framework is easy to use
- Readability: React gives you a very clear idea of what your code is doing and where it’s going
Disadvantages of Reactjs
Below is the list of disadvantages of Reactjs
- It has a steep learning curve and can be difficult to learn if not aware of JavaScript
- The API is hard to extend as it doesn’t allow you to create custom elements/components with custom logic without rewriting the whole library from scratch.
- It is not developed to operate in a production environment.
- It uses a lot of memory and CPU
Comparison Of Angular Vs React
Following is a detailed comparison of Angular and React.
Popularity
Angular has been slowly gaining more and more popularity among developers over the last few years due to its simplicity and ease of use. To date, Angular has 81.5k stars on Github. On the other hand, React possesses 188k stars.
Seems React is winning the race in this case, but it doesn’t mean that it is the best. Don’t make quick decisions; read other parameters as well before making a final decision.
Contributors
Contributors are the one who works towards improving the quality, features and adaptability of the framework. To put it simply, the more the brains work to improve the working of the framework, the better will be the technology.
On GitHub, React has 1342 contributors, while 1035 contribute to the improvement of the Angularjs framework.
Testing
In Angular (which is a dynamically typed language), it tests the app completely. That is why developers have to adopt a rigid sequence of tests. Despite a number of features of Angular, the code is written in such a way that it can be tested easily.
Reactjs offers mocking, which means the code is tested during the development phase itself. In order to do so, one can use test runners like Mocha and Jest. Here is some more information about the testing framework:
Jest is a testing framework for React that makes it easier to test your application. It has a lot of features, including mocking, stubbing, and spies, that help you write tests more efficiently.
Mocha is a JavaScript test framework that is used to automate the test process. It helps developers and testers in writing unit and functional tests and allows developers to focus on writing code instead of worrying about the boilerplate code that comes with using React.
Size Comparison
Generally, Angular to React would be 4:1, seems like Angular is trailing. To be specific, the bundle size of Angular is 1200 KB and React around 300 KB. One can further reduce the size with the help of gzip.
Over To You
There is one framework that is best for all types of applications. While selecting the same, one needs to do research regarding the features, pros and cons of prospective frameworks and see if they fit with the requirements of their apps.
No matter whichever framework you choose, it should be easy to learn, easy to integrate, and easy to maintain. These are the three main factors that you should consider when choosing a framework for your next project.
If you are looking forward to hiring React or Angular developers, kindly interview developers of EnProwess first. You won’t regret it!
Guest article written by: 
I, Bhavik Trivedi, VP at EnProwess – a leading Software development company that provides offshore developers at a reasonable price. I am passionate about learning and teaching technology-related stuff and how to build profitable tech businesses. I love to talk about technology and the future of the world. I always welcome the opportunity to share my knowledge, passion, and enthusiasm for all things tech!