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Difference between the Angular and React Frameworks and Which One Is the Best Suited for Your Project

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With the exponential boom of technology, web development as a subfield or a sub-sector has seen spectacular growth. Whenever we hear of the JavaScript ecosystem, the first two names that will inevitably pop up in our minds almost immediately are Angular and React.

The reason for it is that these two have gained quite a lot of fame as the most popular frameworks for Front–end development. However, since it is impossible to apply both frameworks at once into your project, the question that is bound to arise in any individual’s mind looking forward to starting a project on a JavaScript framework is how you can choose anyone between both options?

Does one first need to look into the requirements of the project in order to reach an accurate decision? Or should one take into account the popularity of either of the frameworks and hence save a lot of time in an early stage?

Well, you do not have to worry about it anymore since we have taken the hassle of going through both the frameworks and concluding which framework might be the most suitable for your project. So, gear yourself up!

What Is Angular?

Angular is a web framework that has been developed as well as maintained by the tech giant Google. It was released back in 2010 under the name AngularJS. Right from its launch date, Angular has become one of the most popular and widely used web frameworks worldwide.

Its popularity can be attributed to two factors, namely, the two-way data binding feature and secondly the dependency injection feature. Another big reason for the popularity of this framework can be given to it being backed up by Google.

What Is React?

In 2013, React, a JavaScript library backed up and supported by Facebook, became open-sourced. As a result, react got the credit for popularizing a web development concept commonly known as a component-based architecture. This concept has proven to provide quite a few benefits such as:

  • The cohesive and modular components which make the framework very reusable and contribute to accelerating the overall time required for the development.
  • It is pretty helpful for mobile development and gives developers the scope to reuse the logical parts that are reusable in the development of mobile apps. The developers need only to tweak the view a little.
  • It is easy to maintain and improve since the components that this concept is made up of are all self–contained.

Just like its contemporary, React too quickly took the whole web development market by a big storm. One can also say that the popularity of React overshadowed a majority of the other frameworks which were available in the market at the time, which also included AngularJS.

In 2016, Google finally upgraded the whole framework of JavaScript, which you can say was a consequence of the excitement and enthusiasm of the web development community that came with the new architecture that was component-based called Angular 2.

Which One Is More Popular: Angular Or React?

Before one decides which framework is more suitable for their web development project, it is always wise to look through both their popularities. Why is that so? Given the bigger and more active community of your chosen framework, you will find it more easy and convenient to find the right solution to any problem that unexpectedly pops up on your way.

If we go to Github, we find that the repository of React has a total of 164k stars, whereas if we take into account both the stars of AngularJS as well as Angular 2, it is a total of 130k.

Both communities have many supporters behind them, and both the frameworks stay right on top of Github as the most starred repositories of all time.

Another exciting way to note the popularity of the frameworks is to consider their total number of downloads on NPM or Node Package Manager. We observed that Angular is quite behind React when it comes to the number of NPM downloads right from 2015, and this number continues to get bigger to date. It is quite contrary to the number of Angular downloads, which has been stagnating.

What Are The Reasons For React’s Recent Popularity When Compared To Angular

The popularity of React has taken over both the angular frameworks combined since 2015 can be attributed to a few factors, including:

  • React has comparatively started getting older, and developers have started to become more comfortable using this technology.
  • React is a lot less complex when compared to Angular, so it takes less time to ramp itself up.
  • When it comes to start-ups, react is more suitable since it requires a lot less time for its development procedures.

We can sum up that although React is nowadays more favoured by developers as a framework, both are still very much popular worldwide.

What Are The Main Differences Between React And Angular?

It is indeed true that both the framework shares quite a few similarities amongst themselves, but they also have a pretty big number of differences between them. So let’s try to get a closer look into this matter:

  • Purpose: Angular is a full-fledged framework and offers its users a strict opinion on structuring the application in the best possible way. It has many small in-built libraries, which helps the user while creating complex applications.
    When it comes to the library of React, it cares about the view while only on the MVC architecture. Therefore, a flux is needed to use this architecture, allowing users to organize their code anyway.
  • Data binding: Angular has a two-way data binding feature, which means that if a user wishes to change the UI input, it will also change the whole state of the model and vice versa.
    React has a one-way binding feature, which means that the UI element cannot change the component state.
  • Language: Angular makes use of the Typescript language, which is a combination of JavaScript along with a language that is statically typed out.
    React uses the JavaScript XML JSX, which can be written in Typescript; however, it is not natively included.
  • UI Components: Angular makes use of components that have an integrated material design. It means that angular offers various components for material designing, which allows the users an opportunity for easy UI configuration.
    React uses a material – UI library along with its dependencies, which means the tools for UI are developed by the community itself and hence React offers its users different types of components for UI.
  • Dependency Injection: Angular supports dependency injection, which allows the users to have different life cycles for the different stores.
    React does not support dependency injection, meaning it has a global state equally available for its components.
  • DOM: Angular has a feature for incremental DOM, which means that when a new DOM is being created, it will automatically compare it with the previous DOM and also put all the differences in the new and the real DOM . Only if it is necessary, it will allocate memory.

React has a virtual DOM, which means that it will automatically make a new virtual DOM whenever a DOM is changed. It will also compare this new one with a previous DOM and modify the real DOM only to find differences.

Final Word

Since the developers have so many different frameworks to choose from nowadays, every single framework has its own set of benefits and setbacks, deciding on any specific framework can be a pretty difficult task for one.

However, when choosing any specific framework between Angular and react, it mostly comes down to personal preference. Both the frameworks are designed to solve the same problems, the only difference between both is their different mode of implementation.

However, you should also take into account that while the learning curve is easier for React, which ultimately leads to a quicker development pace, Angular is the one that has a higher amount of built-in functionalities. Both technologies are very advanced and powerful and are aimed to speed up your development process!

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