Angular vs React: Is Angular Dead?

Introduction

The conversation around which front-end framework/library to use when building new web applications, or updating legacy applications, is important because it directly impacts the next 3 to 5 years of your software development team.

Front-end technologies, frameworks, and tools continue to evolve, and while some have risen to near-ubiquity, others are strong contenders with the potential the influence the community in the years to come.

When choosing a front-end technology, JavaScript has plenty of options such as VueJS and Svelte. However, Angular and React remain at the top of the list for most developers.

There are a few different ways to evaluate the right front-end technology, but in this article we will focus on React and Angular and explore just exactly why you’d want to use one or the other.

Angular and React are popular open-source JavaScript frameworks backed by Google and Meta (Facebook), respectively, with large developer communities supporting both.

What both React and Angular have in common is that they can be used for building single and multi page apps on both web and mobile. So right off the bat, both are powerful and robust options, but that’s where their similarities come to an end.

Coming to a final decision regarding Angular vs React requires a clear analysis of a variety of details such as:

• The back end of your web and/or mobile app
• Your current development team if you have one
• Current and future hiring requirements
• Budget
• Project roadmap/timeline
• Project requirements (scale and complexity)
• Performance requirements

What is React?

React is an open-source library developed at Meta and released in 2013. It uses component-based architecture to simplify the creation of complex, interactive user interfaces  and break them down into smaller, reusable components.

While component-based architecture isn’t a unique quality of React, the way it implements this concept feels rather lightweight and leaves plenty of room for structuring your application the way you want.

React is also built around the concept of a unidirectional data flow. Changes in data flow down through the component hierarchy, triggering updates and re-renders, thus avoiding common issues with two-way data binding, such as:

• Performance problems
• Hard-to-debug code

The name React comes from Reactive programming, which is a declarative programming paradigm. React’s core feature is to “react” or respond dynamically to changes in data.

Seeing as Facebook (Meta) is a social media network with hundreds of thousands of changing elements, it makes sense that they needed a better way to handle this kind of complexity.

React is based on JavaScript ES6 and combined with JSX, which is a syntax extension used to write HTML-like markup in a JavaScript file.

Some distinctive features of React that are different than Angular are:

• Declarative views
• JSX
• One-way data-binding
• VirtualDOM

Note that React is not a framework, but instead, a library for UI development which makes it quite lightweight and minimalistic. We’ll dive into what this means in the next section discussing the benefits and drawbacks of React.

Benefits of React

React has long been the technology of choice for front-end developers looking to build user interfaces.

Here are some of the prime benefits of ReactJS:

• Large talent pool
• Easy learning curve
• Reusable code via components
• Easier debugging
• Faster development time
• Enhanced developer productivity
• Server-side rendering
• Integration with third-party libraries
• Easy version upgrades
• Mobile app development with React Native

Large talent pool

React has the largest talent pool out of any front-end technology out there. Finding React developers of any level of experience is easy and running a hiring cycle will result in a ton of resumes coming your way.

Senior React developers are also easier to find, due to React’s popularity. Many developers switched over to React after AngularJS and now we’re seeing plenty of mature talent who have already spent almost a decade using the technology.

Easy learning curve

React is a JavaScript-based library, which means that developers only need to know ES6 to get started. That means less time spent learning framework-specific code and more time writing UI components!

As a minimalist library, React does not have dependency injection, templates or other complicated features. On top of that, it’s extremely flexible when it comes to project structure.

There is one small caveat: it does take some time to learn how to set up a project properly. Thankfully, there are a lot of best practices out there to learn.

Senior React developers should already be on top of the latest updates and best practices.

Reusable code via components

React’s component-based architecture allows developers to break down user interfaces into smaller components that can be reused in different parts of an application. This type of built-in refactoring makes front-end codebases cleaner and easier to maintain.

Easier debugging

React comes with a set of browser extensions and developer tools, such as React Developer Tools and Redux DevTools (if using Redux).

These tools provide enhanced debugging capabilities such as component inspection, state visualization, and time-travel debugging.

Developers can also examine component hierarchies, inspect props and states, and track component updates, making it easier to identify issues and understand how the application behaves.

In addition, React provides meaningful error messages and warnings that include information about the component, the source of the error, and the stack trace.

React also supports PropTypes (a built-in type-checking mechanism) that integrates with TypeScript. Developers can define the types and structures of component props, state, and function parameters.

Having strong types helps catch potential issues during development and developers can receive type-related warnings or errors, improving code quality and reducing debugging efforts.

Faster development time

React’s modular structure allows developers to break down the UI into smaller, manageable pieces, making it easier to develop, test, and maintain code. Additionally, its declarative syntax makes it easier to plan and manage the application state.

Enhanced developer productivity

React comes with a few technical perks that enhance productivity such as hot reloading, which allows developers to see the results of their changes immediately.

Another benefit of React is its large ecosystem and community. Developers can leverage existing solutions and best practices, reducing time spent reinventing the wheel.

Server-side rendering

Server-side rendering is not a default React capability, and in their official documentation, they recommend using frameworks like Next.js instead of just using React. However, developers can still configure server-side rendering via ReactDOMServer.

One of the main benefits of server-side rendering is SEO. It’s easier for search crawlers to index a page if the HTML is generated on the server side. This is particularly important for websites relying on organic search traffic.

There are also performance benefits such as improved initial page load time. Since the server generates the HTML content, this allows the user to see the content faster compared to client-side rendering, where the entire page is rendered on the client side after downloading the JavaScript bundle.

Integration with third-party libraries

Whether it’s UI component libraries, state management libraries, data fetching libraries, or testing frameworks, the broad array of options available for React developers is incredible.

Third-party integrations offer specialized functionality that may not be available in the core React library. For example, charting libraries, mapping libraries, or authentication services may provide features that are specifically tailored to those domains.

Another great example of how third-party libraries give an edge to React are libraries such as React Router that enable efficient routing and navigation. Even state management libraries like Redux or MobX offer optimized ways to manage complex application states.

Finally, third-party libraries can make rapid prototyping easier by leveraging the near out-of-the-box functionality that comes with it.There’s truly no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to React. With such a large community powering the third-party ecosystem, there’s a solution to almost any UI challenge developers face.

Easy version upgrades

React releases new versions regularly, introducing new features, performance enhancements, and bug fixes. These upgrades are easy to implement without much risk of breaking the existing code.

Mobile app development with React Native

The React Library also supports React Native, an open-source framework for cross-platform mobile development. React Native allows developers to build mobile applications using JavaScript, and more importantly shares React’s core concepts along with JSX for building components.

Disadvantages of React

While there are many advantages of React, one such disadvantage is tooling complexity. While React has a wide range of tools, libraries, and build configurations for developers to tap into, this flexibility can lead to a more complex tooling setup and configuration process.

Setting up the development environment, choosing the right tools, and managing the build pipeline can be challenging for new developers. For senior React developers, this will not be much of a challenge.

On top of that, React doesn’t enforce project structure or architectural patterns in the way other frameworks might. For senior React developers, this is fine as they should be comfortable establishing their own structures and being up-to-date on the latest community best practices.

Hard to find and validate great talent

Earlier we mentioned that one of React’s big advantages when it comes to hiring is that there’s a ton of talent out there. Unfortunately, it’s also hard to find good talent because there are so many developers out there. 

If you’re looking for senior React developers, the search won’t be as hard as other frameworks but it will be hard to validate their skills against their experience.

Developers come from all backgrounds and teams, and not all developers grow the same. Just because one developer has 6 years of experience with React on and off is much different than a developer who has consistently used the library for 4.

Senior developers are also not usually in the market, so you’ll need to attract them somehow to your project.

What is Angular?

Angular is an open-source web application framework developed by Google and is used to build dynamic and robust single-page and enterprise-grade applications. The framework boasts a collection of integrated libraries and features such as client-server communication, routing, RxJS, and more!

Angular also comes with a suite of developer tools such as Angular CLI, NgRX, and Testing Utilities that make scaling projects quicker and safer.

In earlier versions, Angular followed the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern, which promotes the separation of concerns and modular development. Google has since moved away from the MCV approach towards a component-based architecture. The latest version of Angular is Angular 16.

Some distinctive features unique to Angular are:

• Two-way data binding
• Directives
• Dependency Injection
• Opinionated architecture

Keep in mind that Angular is a complete framework and therefore much more opinionated on how web applications are organized and built than React. This type of structural guardrail guarantee that whatever you build in Angular will work as expected for the most part.

Recently, the Angular team is being led by a former Vue.js core team member and has been shipping some amazing changes lately that address the community’s needs and pain points. The Angular team actively listens and ships meaningful updates several times a year.

Benefits of Angular

Angular is an extremely powerful framework that has ready-made solutions to the most common challenges developers face when building web applications.

Here are some of the prime benefits of Angular:

• Stable talent pool
• Powerful features like RxJS and AngularCLI
• Intuitive application structure
• Strong type checking
• Reduced cognitive load when building out components
• Ease in building, maintaining, testing and updating with fewer foot guns
• Cross-platform development support
• Improved developer productivity
• Performance optimizations

Stable talent pool

While talent for Angular may not be as plentiful as React, the quality of engineers naturally will be slightly higher. Those who stick with Angular, learn and use it well, and are proud of their experience.

Powerful features like RxJS and AngularCLI

Angular comes with a ton of power right out of the box. With features such as Angular CLI, routing, RxJS, Forms, and Universal, developers can easily build extremely stable and robust web applications without having to search, evaluate and learn third-party libraries.

RxJS provides a powerful set of tools for handling asynchronous operations, event streams, and data manipulation. With RxJS, developers can compose complex asynchronous workflows and manage streams of data in a declarative and efficient way.

Another feature Angular provides is a two-way data binding mechanism that allows automatic synchronization of data between the model and the view.

As Angular is a framework, it comes with built-in routing. Developers can define routes and associate them with specific components, and enable navigation in a Single-Page Application context.

NgForm provides comprehensive support for building and validating forms in web applications, offering both template-driven and reactive forms. Of course, forms come with two-way data binding, validation, controls, custom validators, and error handling.

Intuitive application structure

Angular standardizes project structure and promotes consistency by generating components via terminal commands.

An Angular application is ultimately built using reusable and self-contained components that help keep applications organized as they grow in complexity.

The framework enforces clear separation of concerns by splitting HTML, CSS, and TypeScript code of each component into separate files. Different aspects of these components are easier to understand and maintain as a result. Managing component complexity is made much easier thanks to concepts like dependency injection.

Angular also uses modules to organize and encapsulate related components and services, grouping together related functionality and establishing clear boundaries within the application.

Strong type checking

Angular is built with and uses TypeScript (a statically typed superset of JavaScript). TypeScript adds features like strong typing, classes, interfaces, and modules which improve code clarity, and quality.

TypeScript also supports compile-time checks that reduce the frequency of runtime errors and make code more reliable and easier to organize and maintain.

Reduced cognitive load when building out components

Components can get complex, which is why Angular has a built-in dependency injection system that helps manage dependencies between different components and services.

Dependency injection simplifies the process of creating, using, and testing components by allowing them to declare their dependencies instead of creating them.

Coupling between different components and modules is reduced.

Ease in building, maintaining, testing, and updating with fewer foot guns

Thanks to the features that Angular provides, building applications is easy! But perhaps more importantly, maintaining Angular applications is a breeze due to the intuitive structure Angular enforces.

When it comes to testing, Angular provides a powerful tool suit for unit testing called Karma and Jasmine that makes it easier to write and execute tests for components and services.

With Angular CLI, updating to newer visions of Angular is seamless in most cases.

Cross-platform development support

Angular allows developers to build mobile applications using technologies like NativeScript and Ionic. NativeScript uses Angular and TypeScript which makes it easy to carry framework-specific skills over.

It’s also possible to integrate Angular with Electro to build feature-rich desktop applications.

Another emerging area where Angular can be useful is building Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). PWAs offer native-like experiences to users such as offline capabilities, push notifications, and device hardware access.

Improved developer productivity

Building applications requires marrying front-end user interfaces with back-end business logic. Angular has a feature called directives that extends the functionality of HTML with custom attributes and tags.

With directives, developers can add behavior to HTML elements, such as showing/hiding elements, manipulating the DOM, or looping over data to generate dynamic content.

In addition, Routing in Angular is accomplished using clear and declarative syntax that defines the navigation structure. This makes it easy to understand and follow the flow of an application.

Data flow is well-defined between components via input and output properties. These properties allow parent components to pass data to child components. Output properties emit events and notify parent components of actions or changes.

Performance optimizations

Angular comes with a couple of features that improve the performance of web applications built using the framework.

Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation transforms templates and components into optimized JavaScript code at build-time. This improves the initial load time and performance by reducing the size of the code and eliminating runtime compilation.

Other features such as Angular Universal, a server-side rendering (SSR) solution that allows applications to be pre-rendered on the server, delivering static HTML to the client.

SSR improves initial load times, enhances search engine optimization (SEO), and provides a better user experience.

Beyond SSR, modules in Angular facilitate lazy loading, enabling on-demand loading and improving app performance as well.

Disadvantages of Angular

As powerful and robust as Angular is, it’s not the quickest front-end technology to learn. There is also the TypeScript pre-requisite.

If performance is a major issue, Angular is a bit heavier due to its comprehensive features and complexity and you won’t have the flexibility to pick and choose. On the bright side, Angular provides several optimization options to mitigate framework overhead and ensure good performance.

Not as much talent

Angular does not have as much talent overall compared to React. Meaning if you are looking for senior Angular talent, it will be a longer hiring cycle overall. 

The upside to this is that if you do come across a senior Angular developer with 5+ years of experience actively working with the framework, there is a good chance that they are technically proficient and will get the job done.

Angular vs React: At-a-glance

At first, Angular and React appeared to be similar kinds of front-end technologies. This couldn’t be further from the truth. While they do share some similarities on a conceptual level, they go about implementing those concepts in different ways.

Let’s compare Angular and React briefly before discussing the technical aspects in detail.

Detailed comparison: React vs Angular

Popularity: Angular vs React

Both technologies are very popular among the front-end developer community. React boasts about 207k stars on GitHub, while Angular has around 88k.

Angular: Angular has grown quite a bit since the early 2010s, originally known as AngularJS. Over the years, Angular matured its technology and became more popular until 2016 when Angular 2 was released. By that point, other technologies were beginning to mature and new frameworks were being released into the community.

React: React stands out as being astronomically more popular than Angular with almost double the usage across the different sites. This is most likely because of the flexibility that it offers due to its minimalist approach.

Performance and scalability: Angular vs React

Both React and Angular are great for building high-performing web apps and their reputations for scalability and performance are pretty even granted React is the more popular of the two.

Angular: Angular probably doesn’t get as much shine these days, but the framework has everything a developer needs to optimize a web app despite being the heavier of the two options.

Features like Ahead-of-Time and Universal boost the performance of the app, while its opinionated take on project structure, dependency injection, and directives help Angular achieve the stability it needs for more complex applications.

React: Being a lightweight and minimal library, React is clearly focused on delivering user interfaces that lend to smaller feature filesizes.

Everything else can be added using a third-party library, shifting the performance liabilities away from React somewhat.

Experienced developers ideally will have learned the best patterns to build and maintain complexity on any level. After all, React was originally developed at Meta to solve an enterprise-grade front-end challenge.

Data binding: Angular vs React

Angular and React handle state in different ways. While React depends on third-party libraries to handle state management like Redux, Angular has built-in data binding.

Angular: Angular users two-way data binding to handle state changes automatically when an interface element is mutated or changed. This means that an underlying variable or collection of data and its view are synchronized.

Angular binds HTML elements to model variables and handles the coordination between the view and the model itself. This eliminates the need to create callback methods to handle changes.

Two-way data binding is extremely efficient as it instantly propagates data between the UI and the data model. Another advantage of two-way data binding is that it creates consistency across the application. When data changes in one component, it will be reflected in other associated UI elements throughout the application.

React: React propagates data only in one direction, and while two-way data binding is more efficient, there are some cases where one-way data binding makes more sense.

There are times when predictability is needed, and in this scenario one-way data binding is the safer option, making the codebase easier to maintain and debug. Being able to easily trace how data is updated and propagated can be very useful in large applications.

Data integrity is another area where one-way data binding shines in. Having better control over data flow by enforcing rules or transformations before displaying data in a user interface is very helpful if presentation is a big deal for you.

One-way data binding also has less overhead than two-way data binding. It avoids the costs associated with tracking changes and synching data between UI and models.

Code quality and maintainability: Angular vs React

Angular and React are slightly different in their approach to code quality and maintainability. While React is a bit more open-ended in this area, Angular takes structure and maintainability very seriously.

Angular: Angular is very opinionated when it comes to code quality and maintainability. From its modular component-based architecture to TypeScript, it’s very difficult to write a poorly written codebase.

Since Angular breaks applications down into components, services, and modules, projects are generally extremely well organized making it easier to test and maintain.

TypeScript provides static typing, classes, interfaces, and modules which also enhance code quality and maintainability. Developers get to benefit from compile-time type checking and improved tooling support and reduce bugs in their code.

There’s also something to be said about Dependency Injection, and how it helps manage dependencies between different parts of an application. Angular is all about loose coupling, reusability, and testing, and Dependency Injection makes that easy.

Angular also integrates with various code analysis tools and linters such as TSLint and ESLint. These tools help catch issues, enforce code standards, and ensure code quality. Linters are helpful to catch errors, throw warnings, and offer suggestions to improve code readability and maintainability.

Finally, AngularCLI makes repeatable tasks like creating new components and linking them together with models and views easy via the command prompts.

React: Though React does not enforce strict code organization and structure, React has a few ways to improve and maintain code quality. From its component-based architecture to JSX, developers can enjoy the benefits of clear app structure and HTML rendering.

React avoids heavy class hierarchies as well, instead focusing on composition. Reusing and managing smaller components is much easier to reason through than relying on class inheritance.

There are also developer tools that assist in debugging, profiling, and inspecting React apps. Developers can inspect the component hierarchy, state, and its props to identify issues.

Server-side rendering: Angular vs React

Angular: It’s hard to beat Angular’s ability to reduce traffic between client and server. With server-side rendering, Angular creates static views before they are made interactive.

React: React has some clever functions like RenderToString that avoid calling Render. You can also use renderToStaticMarkup to prevent DOM attributes from being created. Look no further than the speed at which Facebook renders its pages.

Testing: Angular vs React

Angular: Angular is structured with testing in mind and provides utilities and frameworks for unit and integration testing. Angular also supports end-to-end testing with tools like Protractor and Cypress.

Frameworks such as Jasmine and Jest help with unit tests on the component, service, and directive levels.

The Angular Testing Library allows apps to be tested from the user’s perspective as well as to verify the behavior of components.

React: React also comes with a test of utilities that help writing tests easier. Frameworks like Jest can be used with React to write unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests for React components.

There is also Enzyme which provides some APIs to traverse, manipulate and assert on React component trees and is widely used in the development community.

React also places a strong emphasis on accessibility, and has specialized tools such as `react-axe` and `jest-axe` for testing the accessibility of components.

Finally, React Testing Library helps test components from the user’s perspective.

Optimizing bundle size: Angular vs React

Bundle sizes are important as they are what must be downloaded at the initial page load. A larger bundle means longer loading times. Optimizing is crucial because of the performance implications it has not just for SEO, but also for the overall user experience.

Angular: Angular provides several features and techniques to optimize bundle size and improve the performance of Angular apps.

Angular CLI provides built-in optimizations to reduce bundle size, and automatically applies techniques like Ahead-of-time compilation, codeminification, and production optimizations.

Ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation allows Angular applications to be compiled ahead of time, eliminating the need for the compiler to be included in the final bundle. As a result, Angular can ship smaller bundle sizes compared to other compilation techniques like Just-in-Time.

Angular can implement Webpack for tree shaking, making it easy for the bundler to identify and remove unused code during the bundling process. Angular also supports lazy loading and route-based code splitting.

React: Unlike Angular, React doesn’t optimize bundle size directly but there are some techniques and tools that can help.

Using a modern bundler like Webpack, which uses a technique called tree shaking, can significantly reduce the bundle size by removing unnecessary components and other dependencies.

Tools like React.lazy and React Router allow developers to take advantage of another technique called code splitting. Code splitting splits the application into smaller chunks allowing the bundler to dynamically load necessary code for a specific feature or route. This reduces the bundle size while improving loading performance.

Lazy loading via React.lazy also helps by not including certain code in the initial bundle.

Learning curve: Angular vs React

The learning curve for each technology is a notorious topic, however, at the senior level, this isn’t such a big deal. Web development theory is universal, and technologies have opinions on how to implement certain concepts.

By this point, senior developers should understand their domain well enough to adapt to any framework or library because they understand the underlying theory.

At this point, it’s all about if they enjoy one over the other for personal reasons, not if one is harder to learn than the other.

Angular: Angular is a pretty large framework and so it will take time to learn. On top of that, developers must also learn TypeScript. Naturally, the learning curve for Angular is a little higher than React at first but as one dives deeper into the framework, development productivity will increase.

React: React uses JavaScript and is ultimately just a small UI library with some standard third-party libraries to extend its functionality. If you’re already familiar with JavaScript, you’re free to jump right in and use React. Best practices come quickly as well.

So which one should you use?

It’s easy to get caught up solely in the discussion of specific use cases and project requirements, where one framework or library might be better than another.

This is the wrong way to think about frameworks. For experienced engineering leaders or managers on teams, choosing a framework is rarely a technical decision. In most cases, the answer comes down to whatever your team is most proficient with. 

Other factors to consider:

• How easy is it to hire people with that experience
• How easy is it to get support
• How big is the community

In the case of why use React over why to use Angular, both are high-caliber frameworks that will get the job done, end of story.

If you’re the one writing the code, ask yourself which one you gravitate towards. If you are managing a team, make this decision a collaborative one and see which one they think will be the most satisfying to use.

Why use React

Senior developers at Trio have typically stated the following reasons why they use React:

• Easy to learn
• It’s easy to create small and reusable pieces of a project
• The community is really big, so it’s easy to find a solution or get help for any issue
• here are many well-known compatible tools and libraries ready-to-use
• Easy to build a simple app but also a very complex and scalable app
• React data flow is much simpler and easier than Angular data flow
• React’s initial boilerplate is much simpler than Angular’s
• Using JSX is almost like using vanilla HTML
• React is always being improvedFinding senior React engineers will take less time when it comes to building or scaling a team, as well as filling gaps quickly. If you decide to hire internally, you will still need to invest time filtering through resumes and evaluating candidates. You can cut down hiring cycle time dramatically by leveraging a tech partner and finding senior React engineers within a week!