Angular Vs. React — The Most Definite Comparison between two titans
By: Rituparna Goswami Mishra
Tags: JavaScript, Angular, Typescript, Web Development, React

Angular Vs. React — The Most Definite Comparison between two titans

Five key differences between Angular and React

Introduction

In today’s world Angular and React are two of the most used frameworks for frontend development. The latest versions of both of the technologies Angular 9 and React 16 come under the MIT license (https://www.mit.edu/) which is an open-source license and requires minimum software redistribution. Which means, we don’t need to invest in a huge software setup to use Angular or React in our projects. Even though they are both JavaScript-based platforms there are a few key differences between these two. Let’s explore the differences. Shall we?

1. Basic Architecture — Framework Vs. Library

Angular is a complete framework, developed using TypeScript and HTML. Whereas React is a JavaScript library and the development uses JavaScript and JSX. Having said that, React does support Typescript as well, but it’s not easy to find the documentation or references in Typescript as opposed to Angular. Angular can also be developed in JavaScript but that’s not widely used. If a developer is more comfortable in JavaScript than TypeScript then it’s better to choose some other platform, React for instance.

Angular is a complete toolkit to create applications. It provides solutions to routing, accessing data services, templating etc. It provides lots of consistency in developing an application including how to structure the projects. But there are some downsides to this structure, i.e. including new classic JavaScript libraries, take some time to set up to work properly with TypeScript and sometimes need to be wrapped within some kind of Angular service to work with Angular components.

As React is a library, it doesn’t have all the components to build a complete application. There are a lot of React libraries that take care of routing, templating etc. Tools like Create React App already include a lot of React libraries, to be used for different features. Besides, it’s easy to add additional libraries without much setup or complexity. The disadvantage for this is a lack of consistency. One can use different libraries/tools to achieve the same functionality. So, for a team, it’s important to decide on which libraries to use.

2. Performance — Real DOM vs. Virtual DOM

React and Angular both rely on DOM or document object model. DOM represents a document as nodes and objects. It’s the object-oriented representation of a webpage.

Angular works on the real DOM, so any small change updates the entire tree structure.

React works with the virtual dom. The Virtual DOM is a lightweight snapshot of the real dom. When anything changes, the entire virtual DOM is updated, but it’s superfast.

When it comes to updating the real DOM, react compares the virtual DOM with the real DOM and only updates the part that has changed. This process is called diffing.

This provides some speed / performance advantage to React over Angular for big, complex and dynamic applications as we are not updating the entire DOM structure, every time something has changed.

3. Data Binding — Two-way vs. One way

Angular uses two-way data binding. Event binding to bind events with methods and property data binding to pass data from the component class and set data of an element at the users end. It takes care of the element properties as well.

React on the other hand is based on a single point of truth, which is its state. Here the UI element can only be changed after changing the model state. A state can only be changed by the “setState” method and the UI is always re-rendered on state change. Since the data flow is one-directional, here we have more control and consistency.

4. Code Structure — Design and logic separation vs. All in one place.

In Angular, the design and the logic are separated in HTML and TypeScript. Even though the binding syntax takes some time to get used to, but the code separation makes it easy to structure the application. It can be quite complex at times when it comes to learning Angular.

In React we have logic, and design in one place. The learning curve for Angular is quite steep as compared to React. But if you are used to Angular, you might not like the code structure in react, which takes away the benefit of being easy to grasp from React.

5. Developer and Popular Uses — Google vs. Facebook

Angular is developed and maintained by Google. It’s used in several Google applications, such as Firebase Console, Google Analytics, Google Express etc. and Forbes, Upwork etc. outside Google

React is developed and maintained by Facebook. It’s used by Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp etc. And Airbnb, Uber, Netflix, Dropbox etc. outside FB.