Best over Better; Angular or React? You Decide!

React Vs Angular
React Vs Angular

Frequently, when you’re on the internet, and you type an address into the address bar and hit the enter key, you’ll be taken to a webpage that catches your attention. Have you ever wondered what goes into the development process of that page and how they make it impressive for you? That’s what you’ll be exploring in the next 10 minutes.

Front-end development involves using a couple of languages to determine how the webpage is structured, designed and functions. These languages are usually HTML, (for structure) CSS, (for design) and JavaScript (for functionality) but a developer is not limited to use these three languages alone.

While these three languages work perfectly fine on their own, they only produce mediocre webpages that struggled to attract a user at first sight. This led to the rise of frameworks and libraries that helped upgrade and enhance the looks and improves user experience as a whole. Angular and React are two such additions to the basic HTML that we’ll focus on in this article.


Let’s take a closer look at Angular and React now:
According to the State of JavaScript 2019, a website that surveys thousands of JavaScript developers, React and Angular are the most loved front-end development tools by the developers’ community.

Angular: Developed and maintained by the giant Google, Angular, or AngularJS, is an open-source front-end framework that lets you extend the functionalities of HTML to provide an environment that is extraordinarily expressive, and quick to develop. It deals with the root problem and allows you to develop dynamic web pages that many frameworks fail to address.

React: An equally powerful and robust front-end tool is React, developed by Facebook. It is a JavaScript library that is used to build interactive user-interfaces. By designing simple views for each state on your website, React will update and render the right components when the data changes on the application, which makes debugging easier.

With that in mind, let’s look at what Angular and React have to offer with a precise side-by-side comparison of general and technical aspects.

AngularReact
How scalable and universal are they?The Angular framework is a popular framework for web development, but it can be used in mobile development too. This can be achieved by incorporating Ionic, a hybrid mobile application development framework. This seems too much of a hassle for a budding developer, and that’s why Angular comes with an additional framework for mobile development called NativeScript that offers deep integration with modern Angular with full-stack features.

If you’re intrigued by NativeScript and want to know more, check out their documentation here https://docs.nativescript.org/
Similar to Angular, React can also be used for both web and mobile application development, but the majority of this work is done by a mobile application framework called Cordova. React offers its mobile counterpart called React Native to produce a smooth and responsive user interface, while significantly reducing load time.

To learn more about React Native for your mobile application, refer their documentation here https://reactnative.dev/docs/getting-started
How much would I have to rely on external resources?One of the main advantages of using Angular is self-sufficiency. You are not required to import any external libraries to extend its functionalities as Angular is a complete solution for all your development needs.Although React makes it painless to create interactive UIs, it doesn’t all come from itself. React depends on several additional libraries like Redux, React Router for optimization, and better performance. 

Some of the functions that Angular supports by default but React needs to import are:
● Data binding
● Component-based routing
● Project generation
● Form validation
● Dependency injection
The Learning Curvature
(“How long will this take me to learn? is a frequent question from a learner’s perspective. We’ll try to answer that in this section.)
Angular is a vast library, and because of this reason, learning all the concepts will take much more time than you anticipate. Angular is more complex to understand, and component management is intricate. On the bright side, some complicated features are embedded in the framework core, which means that the developer cannot avoid learning them and use them directly. Moreover, there are a lot of ways of solving a single issue.React, on the other hand, is not quite complicated as Angular is, but it does require a more in-depth understanding of the main concepts. This includes thorough research on the component lifecycle and stateless/stateful behaviour to design the application effectively. Further, it lacks an essential feature of Angular, that is, the “batteries included” nature. Because of this, you wind up, making more decisions about how to structure the application and solve problems.

Let’s talk about the things that matter.

Apart from these cool features Angular and React offers, we have compiled the demand, trends, and performance of these tools to help you decide what suits best to your needs.

Who is the most popular among the two?

You can find the open-source community involvement and popularity for both of these frameworks below.

GitHub: Angular holds 59,200 stars whereas React holds 134,000 stars

Stack Overflow: A survey of approximately 90,000 developers concluded that 74.5% of them love React while 57.6% of them love Angular.

Demand in the market: According to itjobwatch.co, Angular has 959 live job opening. On the other hand, React also has 950 live job openings (as of August 2020)

Does React perform better than Angular? Performance is an essential quality attribute of every tool used. It is all about making websites fast, including making slow processes seem fast.

React uses virtual DOM while Angular operates on real DOM.

Imagine you want to update user profile details. Real DOM, instead of changing just that bit of info, updates the entire tree structure of HTML tables until it reaches the needed data. In comparison, virtual DOM allows us to update the changes virtually without rewriting the entire HTML doc. Regardless of the application’s size, this renders updates faster and ensures fast performance.

Here is a comparison of the performance of both the frameworks:

OperationAngular (in ms)React (in ms)
Loading10 ms7 ms
Scripting173 ms102 ms
Rendering3 ms6 ms
System73 ms129 ms
Idle30343042 ms
Painting2 ms4 ms
Total3295 ms3289 ms

Top brands that hire React developers:

  • Facebook
  • Airbnb
  • Uber
  • Netflix
  • Instagram
  • WhatsApp
  • Khan Academy
  • Dropbox

Top brands that hire Angular developers:

  • Google
  • Nike
  • Forbes
  • Upwork
  • General Motors
  • Paypal
  • Telegram

So, that is it about React and Angular. If you’ve come this far and paid attention to all the details, then give yourself a pat on the back for taking the first step in becoming an Angular or/and React developer. To decide which of these two frameworks is the best is subjective to the developer using it. They are also entirely different frameworks for different usage. You might’ve heard statements like React is better than Angular or sometimes vice versa.

In the end, it all comes to your perception of the two frameworks we’ve discussed so far. The choice is yours based on the application requirement of functionality and usability.

If you’re looking to begin your career in front-end development, check out the courses we offer.

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