React vs Angular: Which Framework is Better?

React vs Angular is a debate that comes up every time front-end programming is needed. The answer depends on many things, and front-end developers have argued about it for years.

JavaScript frameworks are changing at a very fast pace, which means that Angular and React are constantly getting new versions.

React and Angular are two of the most popular front-end development frameworks out there, so they’ll probably be part of the conversation when the topic is JavaScript Ecosystem.

But how do you choose between react and angular, in the first place? Should you choose based on what the project calls for first? Or, in the beginning, think about its popularity and how long it will take to grow?

These two well-known front-end frameworks have been in fierce competition for years. So, what’s the best choice?

Overall, both React and Angular grow naturally and follow a similar pattern. If we try to predict how much these front-end frameworks will be used, we can see that React is more likely to be used than Angular.

There is angry debate about which of the two front-end platforms, such as Angular or React, should be used for a project. We call it a debate because we want to keep things as clear as possible. Still, many of our clients here at Talendor ask us to recommend the best front-end framework. 

An interesting fact is that React vs Angular, indirectly, is also a Facebook vs Google battle.

First and foremost, let’s start by breaking down each solution in its universe, shall we?

What is React?

Facebook is responsible for developing and open-sourcing the user interface (UI) library known as React. I want to bring attention to the fact that we are at a library here. I will elaborate on the significance of this at a later time.

Also due to its “learn once, write anywhere” philosophy, developers can create fast and scalable programs for all platforms. Facebook, along with a network of individual developers and other communities, is still responsible for managing React.

React is the most popular UI library, and thousands of websites use it. React’s main language is JavaScript, and it can run on many different platforms, such as the web, Android, iOS, and even VR.

What is Angular?

Angular is a front-end framework that Google created and shared with the public. Right away, you can tell that these are fundamentally different. React is a library, while Angular is a framework. In the last part, I’ll explain what the difference is between these two terms.

Angular is a framework for building scalable web apps from separate parts. It has a set of libraries and features that work well together, like client-server communication, routing, and more.

It also comes with a set of developer tools that can be used to build and scale projects from single-developer to enterprise-level. The Angular team at Google is in charge of making sure that the technology is always up to date.

Angular’s main programming language is TypeScript, and it can also run on a wide range of platforms. The MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern, which is one of the standards in the industry, is part of Angular’s main architecture.

• Two-way data binding
• Dependency injection
• Template language: HTML
• Its syntax is easy to learn.

So, what are the similarities between React and Angular?

React vs Angular: Similarities

React and Angular both produce front-end apps. This app might be a website or an app. Both utilize NPM, making sharing repetitive code and JavaScript behind the scenes easy to share.

Generally, a React vs Angular analysis usually leads to the same topics.

Architecture. Both of these solutions have an architecture similar to MVC, but some things are wrong with them (as I will talk about in the last section). Also, you can use TypeScript to build with both Angular and React, but only React supports pure JavaScript. Last but not least, both rely on components, which is pretty much the same as most other UI frameworks (like Vue, Flutter, etc.).

Mobile development. NativeScript lets you write native apps with Angular and Vue. React Native lets you write native apps with React. Both have about the same level of performance and features. The difference is in how you get to the platform. In React Native, if you want to use some native API methods, you would have to write a bridge in Kotlin or Swift. On Native Script, you can use JS code to directly call native methods. On the other hand, React Native has a much larger community. Speaking of which…

Community. A large group of people currently supports both of these solutions. Since React and Angular are open-source, many companies use them and try to keep them running and up-to-date, so you can feel safe using them. You probably won’t have any problems because the documentation isn’t complete, there’s no help on Stack Overflow, or there aren’t any third-party libraries.

But, we also need to consider, in the battle of React vs Angular, their weaknesses and greatness.

Pros & Cons of each framework

Ok, we know the similarities. They all seem to be awesome tools, and you’re right, they are. Are they perfect? Surely not! Hope that’ll become clear after reading the next topics:

React pros

• The syntax of React is very simple, which makes it much easier to learn. All engineers have to do is remember how to write in HTML, and that’s it. No need to learn TypeScript in-depth as you do with Angular.
• React, when used with ES6 and ES7, is able to handle a lot of traffic in a simple manner.
• When HTML, XHTML, or XML documents are processed by a virtual DOM, browsers are more likely to accept a tree structure (document object model). This is exactly how React operates behind the scenes.
• High level of adaptability and responsiveness at its best.
• It is an open-source JavaScript library constantly being improved and updated by developers from all around the world.
• Facebook provides “codemods” to automate the migration process, making it simple to switch between React versions.
• Large, scalable, and fast web applications are some of the things that you can create with React.
• Data on the user side is easily represented on the server side at the same time. This makes it extremely light-weighted.
• Use cases: mobile, web, and desktop applications.
• Has efficient memory usage.
• Adaptable to any front-end framework and scalable.
• React embraces Javascript in a unique way, and is not opinionated.
• If you employ well-structured components, there are fewer defects and less code required.
• The one-way data flow in your application will instantly reflect any changes you make.
• React supports a wide range of platforms, allowing for the creation of complicated applications with clean UIs.
• Using Javascript, HTML, and CSS, you can create single-page apps that don’t require reloading.
• When a developer makes a change, they don’t have to reload the page in order to see it.
• React code is easier to read and understand than HTML or template languages like Handlebars or Twig.

React cons

• React is agnostic, and developers have too many options. This means that learning React will necessitate familiarity with other backend frameworks, such as MVC, in order to get the most out of it.
• As a general rule, CSS should be written in a way that is easy to understand. But React’s CSS community is divided between traditional stylesheets (CSS Modules) and JS-based CSS (CSS-in JS) (i.e. Styled Components).
• For some developers, the combination of templating and logic (JSX) can be perplexing at first.
• Because it isn’t a full framework, React isn’t a one-stop shop. To implement features like routing, authentication, and so on, you’ll need to use additional libraries.

Angular pros

• When Angular is compared to standard JavaScript development, it gives developers a great platform for making apps quickly. Also, coding is much more effective and the user experience is better.
• There are new features like a better version of RXJS, a faster way to compile (it takes less than 3 seconds), and a new way to launch HttpClient.
• Detailed documentation that lets each developer get all the information he needs without having to ask his colleagues. But this means that people need more time to learn.
• The web documentation includes explicit instructions on how to use its core features as well as pertinent application samples, allowing developers to construct complex applications more quickly.
• Running the components in parallel optimizes the developers’ work and saves lines of code.
• Two-way data binding lets the app act in a single way, which reduces the chance of mistakes.
• There are built-in capabilities in Angular like Rxjs and AngularCLI that make it easier to construct channels for transferring information and processing events on an autonomous basis. Debugging a project with Angular is no longer a problem.
• Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) lets developers work on different parts of the same app section at the same time by using the same set of data.
• Dependency injection of the components’ features related to modules and modularity in general.
• Angular’s data-binding features make it possible for controllers and views to share data. So, it is easier to test and can work with other libraries or frameworks.
• Fast server-side rendering, supporting views that lack browser-side rendering.
• Its model-view-controller architecture makes it simple to create apps that work on any platform supported by Chrome or Firefox browsers.
• Improves overall performance.

Angular cons

• The learning curve can also be significant depending on your past expertise with web development – and when anything goes wrong, it’s not necessarily obvious.
• When migrating from an earlier version to the current, migration complications may arise.
• If numerous components are changed at the same time, it is difficult to convert old code into Angular.
• A variety of various structures (Injectables, Components, Pipes, Modules, etc.) makes it more difficult to learn than React and Vue.js, which just have “Component.”
• Many benchmarks show that performance is a bit slower. On the other hand, it’s easy to deal with if you use something called “ChangeDetectionStrategy,” which lets you control how components are rendered.
• The sophisticated syntax originates from Angular’s original version. Nonetheless, Angular 5 employs TypeScript 2.4, which is the easiest to learn in comparison.

So, do we have a winner in the React vs Angular battle? Not yet!

Why React is better than Angular

React provides a rational approach to breaking complicated user interfaces into smaller, reusable components. Furthermore, because it is a lightweight library, it does not take up much memory. It can also be used with many different libraries and frameworks.

Because Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, employs React on its website, you can be confident that the people who work on it know what they’re doing. They have made use of their knowledge and ingenuity to develop a framework that is user-friendly, comprehensively documented, and available to anybody.

The virtual DOM, the approach used by React, ensures changes are kept to a minimum and optimized in a smart way. This makes systems run faster. All of the virtual DOM manipulations happen “behind the scenes,” meaning they happen internally and on their own. This saves a lot of hardware resources (CPU power and battery in mobile devices, for instance, which should give you a hint as to when to use React as well).

React render pages very quickly, and any changes to the view and the virtual DOM reflect in real-time. The diff algorithm puts together the old and current virtual DOM states and figures out the best way to apply new changes without having to do too many updates. In the end, you need just a few changes to get the fastest read/write time, improving the overall performance.

In summarizing, in React vs Angular battle, the first is the winner because:

• Easy to use
• High rendering performance
• Unidirectional data binding

Companies that use React

Netflix 

Netflix, a world-class media streaming service, uses React for low-performance devices because it is designed for them. Like how Netflix uses the React library to improve runtime performance, make the app more modular, and speed up how fast it starts up.

The team changed its look in 2015 by adding a React UI. It chose React because of how quickly it can be set up, how well it worked when it was running, and how easy it was to change.

Uber

Since the beginning of React Native, Uber’s engineering team has used its features. The Uber team also made Base Web, a reusable design system with UI components for admin dashboards. It is built on React and lets you make user interfaces that work on any device.

With Uber’s ride-sharing app for phones, you can call, find, and pay private drivers. The app can be used in over 200 major cities in 67 different countries. React is also used by UberEats, a company that helps Uber deliver food. The framework made it easier for people to use the web application, which made customers happier.

The New York Times

PHP used to load HTML and JavaScript, but the New York Times has switched to a combination of Node, React.js, and GraphQL, which makes the front end more stable.

The New York Times has also made a brand-new project for the different ways that stars will show up on the red carpet at the Oscars. The project was made with the React platform, and users could use filters to find the pictures they wanted. The most impressive thing about React was that it made it possible to re-render the whole page.

Tests in React

When writing tests, it’s best to make fake versions of the parts that aren’t already present in the testing environments. Tests can look at how the other parts of the function work and guess how they will interact. It is the mocking of data or functions, and it is a good way to keep data fetching from being flaky. Because there are mocking functions, tests in React are very easy to plan.

As part of the development process, React runs its test suites all the time to run the test cases.

Let’s walk through some of the most common test libraries used on React projects.

Jest

Jest is a testing framework that is used by Uber, Airbnb, and other teams. It is used by Facebook to test React components. So, the React community says that Jest is the best testing framework for React. Jest works out of the box with many JavaScript projects, including create-react-app, NG, Vue, TS, and Babel.

The complete-API philosophy of Jest and the way it tests UI snapshots work well with React. Process-based parallel testing and the option to give failed tests priority are also good for performance. Jest is probably the most popular testing framework for React. Here is a helpful guide on how to use Jest and Enzyme to test React applications.

Chai

Chai is an assertion and expectation library for BDD and TDD that can be wonderfully combined with any javascript testing framework. It is designed to work with node.js and browsers. It is most commonly used for testing in Mocha with Enzyme, although it can also be used in conjunction with Jest and Enzyme. The fundamental interfaces of Chai are equipped with functions such as expect, should, and assert, which allow you to define what kind of results you should anticipate from a test. It may be beneficial to give Mocha a try if you plan to utilize it as your testing framework in the future.

Enzyme

Just to clarify, Enzyme is not a testing framework. Instead, it is a testing tool for React that makes it easier to test the outputs of components by hiding how they are rendered.

With testing frameworks like Jest, it’s hard to get into React testing without running into Enzyme.

Enzyme lets you manipulate, traverse, and in some ways simulate runtime based on the output, which is similar to what JQuery used to do with the DOM. In short, it can help you render components, find elements, and interact with them. Try combining Jest and Enzyme, or use Enzyme with Karma, Mocha, etc.

Cypress

Cypress is an end-to-end testing framework for JavaScript that makes it easy to set up, write, run, and debug tests in the browser. It has its own dashboard that lets us control how our tests are going, and because it works in the browser, you can use the browser’s development tools at the same time.

With snapshots, you can go back in time, automatically reload changes to tests and wait for assertions, and easily find bugs in your code. With parallelization and load balancing built-in, it’s also much easier to debug tests in CI. But you can’t use Cypress to run two browsers at once, which could be a problem. Cypress is not as popular as Puppeteer, but it can help you test your React apps from start to finish. Even this library was made to make things easier.

Why Angular is better than React

Angular is a great web framework with a lot of cool features. It keeps track of the state of the application, making it predictable and giving it a clear architecture. Its modules also allow it to be modular and reused.

What else should be considered in this React vs Angular battle? It also allows two-way data binding, which means that when data in an application changes, all of its parts will be updated automatically without you having to do anything.

It saves time and work because you don’t have to manually update each part every time something changes. The only bad thing about using the Angular framework is that it has a lot of documentation, making it hard to learn.

Angular accelerates front-end development and is the fastest standalone solution for building data-driven web applications. Because Google engineers designed it, you may be confident in its dependability and code-efficiency, supported by a large community of specialists. Angular is well-known for its model-view-controller capability, which enhances the functionality of browser-based apps by lowering the amount of javascript code required to make the application functional and robust.

In contrast to Angular, React developers must connect third-party entities to access certain React methods and achieve fully interactive functionality. It has state containers similar to Redux, which enables faster building of scalable apps such as managing to render and exploiting dynamic components, but it also requires other tools.

In the end, it works well for making large-scale apps with many features. So, you can use Angular when you want to work on the following parts of web development.

Here, the clear winner in the React vs Angular battle is the latter.

Companies that use Angular

Paypal

Paypal is one of the world’s largest and most popular ways to send and receive money. It has used Angular to build the PayPal checkout system, which has important parts like a page to review the payment and pages for adding credit cards. When it comes to these features, security and smooth functionality are the most important things.

PayPal uses Angular to build dynamic web pages that can get PayPal transaction data in real time.

In the end, it’s safe to say that Angular is the main reason why PayPal’s mobile and web apps work the way they do.

Samsung 

Founded in 1938, Samsung has quickly become one of the most important multinational competitors in the electronics business.
Even though Samsung is usually associated with hardware, they made responsive websites with Angular code on the front page.
Samsung stands out among Angular companies because it is a top leader in the electronics industry.
The Samsung Forward service page uses Angular to add transitions and animations that look good and work well on mobile devices to improve the customer experience.

Localytics 

Localytics is a well-known tool used by well-known companies like Microsoft, The New York Times, HBO, and many more. It has used Angular to improve its features and give itself a separate identity. It has done this by using Angular’s UI suite to reduce the amount of code needed to keep the app running.

Delta

Delta Air Lines is one of the most competitive airlines in the U.S. Its website is ranked fifth in the travel and tourism category for front-page traffic.

Delta’s website relies a lot on Angular. Instead of putting it in different airline web applications, they put the framework on the homepage.

Delta’s integration means that customers can now register flight information and do advanced airfare searches while pages load quickly and the user experience is smooth.

Tests in Angular

Javascript testing is tough to obtain 100% coverage. Javascript code must have rigorous testing for this reason. Angular’s characteristics include code segregation and testability.

Angular’s dependency injection functionality makes it easy to pass component dependencies and simulate them.

Let’s walk through some Angular unit testing tools. Three groups of tools exist. First, test frameworks. Test runners follow. Finale: miscellaneous tools.

Mocha

Mocha is the first tool on our recommended list. It is a testing framework written in JavaScript that can run on Node.js as well as in the browser. Asynchronous testing is simplified using this tool, which is one of the framework’s primary advantages.

Siesta

Siesta is a tool for unit testing as well as testing the user interface. Its main purpose is to be a general testing tool for Javascript. It is possible to test not only web pages but also processes written in Node.js. Siesta is compatible with all of the most popular web browsers, and it also works in headless settings thanks to its compatibility with Puppeteer and headless WebDriver.

Karma

Karma is a JavaScript test runner. It is one of the testing tools that come with Angular. The other is Jasmine. But there’s nothing stopping you from using another testing framework instead of Jasmine since Karma doesn’t care what testing framework you use. This library can efficiently work with tools like Jenkins or Travis, so you can easily add it to your CI pipeline. Last but not least, you can easily manage your workflow from both your terminal and your IDE. There’s no need to run a separate app or another tool.

Jasmine

Jasmine is the most well-known testing framework. It is a tool to perform BDD tests. Its main benefits are that it doesn’t depend on any other JavaScript frameworks and doesn’t need a DOM. One of the main goals of Jasmine is to make it easy to write tests by giving you a simple syntax. It is also the test framework that comes with Angular. It comes with Angular CLI out of the box. Since it’s so easy to use, it’s not surprising that so many people use it.

Is react vs angular the only interesting battle?

Not at all! Even though React and Angular are still at the top of the list, there are other well-known and interesting frameworks and libraries that you should look into before making a choice:

Vue.js

Vue.js is a well-known framework for making user interfaces that work in any modern browser and are compatible with Node.js. It comes with a component-based architecture, data binding in both directions, computed properties, and a lot more out of the box.

The learning curve is very gentle because there is good documentation and a large number of starter kits on Github or Vue School. Developers used to working with frameworks like Angular or React find it easier to learn. Vue.js might be just what you need if you want a framework that lets you make prototypes quickly and easily.

Svelte

Svelte, like React and Vue, is a JavaScript framework/library. It is a collection of components, tools, and rules for building the structure of websites and apps using JavaScript. On the other hand, Svelte has created its unique method of allowing developers to design exactly what they need and desire. Svelte is frequently referred to as a compiler because of its novel methodology.

Ember.js

It is an open-source, client-side JavaScript framework for building ambitious web apps that can handle a lot of traffic without any trouble. It is different from other popular frameworks like Backbone.js or AngularJS because it has more advanced features and better tools, such as a command-line build system and automatic dependency injection.

It’s a great choice for developers who want to make high-volume apps with rich user experiences because it has powerful features and strong support from experts.

Aurelia

It is a JavaScript framework for mobile, desktop, and web platforms that is free and open source. Aurelia comes with features that are ready to use, and its HTML templates are easy to change. It also works with standards for Web Components.

Aurelia comes with charts and popular libraries like TypeScript, RxJS, etc., and it’s easy to make your own plugins by extending or making new classes.

Aurelia-pal is a pluggable library that adds packages without shipping them with the core files. It has a lot of ready-to-use patterns. Aurelia can cut development time by up to 90%, and companies like SAP, Pivotal Software, and Scania all back it up.

So, who won the React vs Angular battle?

Hiring React or Angular engineers?

Companies and entrepreneurs struggle to locate and recruit the best-suited, most dependable, and most long-term potential people. And when making this React vs Angular analysis, they might still feel insecure about the best choice. Especially with global remote jobs.

Here at Talendor we built a platform that would analyze and recruit the best software engineers in the world. If you need to hire a great React or Angular software engineer for your project, click here to know more!