Let's check the results: how did the Angular perform in 2019?
Tags: angular, javascript
Published: 2020-01-08 14:23:40

2019 is over. A lot had happened in the JavaScript ecosystem during the year. The web development itself is changing and growing and the popularity of the different JavaScript frameworks is dynamic. One day React is dominating, the other day new player comes to the game (I am pointing my finger to you, Vue.js), and the next day a younger brother conquers his brother (Angular).

Now, when the statistics are clear, everything is counted and saved in the archives of the internet, it’s a great time to review how did the Angular performed in 2019. So how did the Angular did comparing with its “furious rivals” React and Vue?

<h1>I’ve put both, Angular and AngularJS, into the comparison</h1>

Even though after the end of active development in 2018 AngularJs is slowly becoming a legacy thing, it still has a base of users. Summing up the statistics of both, Angular and AngularJs would be silly, however ignoring the AngularJs would also be unfair. And from the data I am going to analyse, you will see that both of them are being used daily, so I’ve decided to include the data of both of them.

Where did I took the data from? <a href="https://github.com/angular/repositories">Github</a>, <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/angular">StackOverflow</a> and <a href="https://npm-stat.com/">npm-stat</a>. 
For the historical data, I’ve used the good old <a href="http://web.archive.org/">Web Archive</a>. I’ve tried to find a snapshot from the earliest day of the January of 2019. Sadly, web archive doesn’t do the snapshots every day, so keep in mind that the historical data that I have used is not from the January 1 of 2019. Statistics are not 100 % accurate, however the deviation is not that big. 

And for the current data, well, I’ve took the current stats from the mentioned sources. Most of the data was captured on January 1th of 2020.

<h1>Github statistics</h1>

Let’s start by analysing how did the Angular appeared in the Github. While some of the metrics are not that important to the big picture of Angular, it still says something. The first metric that I am going to compare, is Github watchers. And with the number of watchers, an interesting thing happened. <b>The count decreased by 87 people for Angular and by 175 for AngularJS.</b>

If the trend might be understandable in the AngularJS case, it is very interesting that watchers also decreased for Angular. Having in mind that other JavaScript frameworks like <a href="https://hackernoon.com/how-react-performed-in-2019-numbers-comparison-y04w2bqd">React gained new watchers over the year</a>, it’s pretty weird that Angular did lost some of the watchers.

Number of Angular watchers:

![Number of Angular watchers](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/8s0xg8q1tsqftlsbtpqg.png)

Number of AngularJs watchers:

![Number of AngularJs watchers](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/q1j1fvx33rx0hvuupg7y.png)

Moving one, another metric, that is probably the most interesting of all, is Github stars. And number of stars definitely increased during the year. <b>Stars of Angular increased by 11 782 (26.7% increase)</b>, and for the <b>AngularJS, the stars increased by 302 </b>, which is kinda expected.

Here are the Github stars of Angular:

![Angular Github stars](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/q3p0cm7zruvxirvvo1v4.png)

And the Github stars of AngularJS:

![AngularJS Github stars](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/emut0f9p9j6h6esl7fek.png)

More information from Github that indicates what was the development like in 2019. Angular information:

![Angular development](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ycsem00wj2p4h2voxgvm.png)

Even though AngularJS is an older version of Angular, it still had received new commits in 2019:

![AngularJS development](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/np4rz49o213alyqdx5b7.png)

<h1>StackOverflow questions</h1>

It was a little bit tricky to determine which questions were related to the new Angular, and which one to AngularJS. So the statistics below includes questions related to both, AngularJS and Angular. Here is how much questions were asked in 2019 with a tag of <b>"angular"</b>:

![Angular questions in StackOverflow](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/oysyxqcirgipfpeep8md.png)

<b>50 490 new questions</b> arised on StackOverflow. It's <b>34.4 % increase</b>.

<b>NPM downloads</b>

Another metric that is probably closest measure how widely the framework was used among the developers, is number of <b>NPM downloads</b>. Looks like that almost half of the current total NPM downloads, Angular received in 2019:

![Angular NPM downloads](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ximpa3s4lrbw47jbtf2q.png)

Seems that AngularJS had also received a significant number of downloads in 2019:

![AngularJS downloads in 2019](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/o1p46i6038wdgzrt5btp.png)

<h1>Conclusion</h1>

In 2019, not only Angular increased by different metrics, but also AngularJS. Even though AngularJS is not being actively developed since 2018, looks like that still many developers are using it.

If you are curious how did the Angular performed comparing to Vue.js and React, <a href="https://vue-view.com/resources/top-javascript-frameworks-in-2019/">check this infographics</a>.