Hey there fellow developers, how you doing? If you are learning JavaScript or front end web development you might have heard in the market there’s a library and a framework competing for giving a better solution to the developer for single page application development and in this blog we will look at some key features of both ReactJS and Angular in depth, what they are, when to use them, and which one is best to learn for beginners.
Let’s dive in
React VS Angular
Major differences between React and Angular are explained with the help of below given points:
History
ReactJS
React was introduced in 2013 by Facebook. It is a JavaScript library used for building UI components. It uses plain old JavaScript and JSX to achieve this.
Angular
AngularJS was launched in 2010 and then nearly after 6 years in 2016 it was launched again redubbed as Angular. It is managed by Google. Angular is a JavaScript framework and specializes in web and app development.
Angular is based on TypeScript.
Sufficiency
ReactJS
ReactJS being a library simply offers UI Development it doesn’t deal with anything related to routing, validation, etc. You need to install additional modules and libraries for any feature that you want in application.
Angular
Angular is a very vast and rigid framework but that offers a complete solution that comes pre-packaged with everything. You just need to know how to use it, no need to install anything.
Data-Binding
Angular uses one-way and two-way data binding whereas ReactJS uses one way data binding.
Though two way data- binding is a lot easier but one way binding is a lot faster and effective with an application having lots of code.
JavaScript’s Role
ReactJS
It is completely based on JavaScript and its ES6 and later versions. ReactJS documentation recommends using JSX (a syntax extension to JavaScript) which makes coding ReactJS a lot easier and faster. With JSX you HTML elements can be directly with JavaScript. These HTML elements are later converted back to react elements but not by the user it’s done by JSX itself.
Angular
It uses TypeScript which is a superset of JavaScript. In TypeScript errors can be caught easily. Code is easy to refactor. Types can be defined.
UI (User Experience)
ReactJS
ReactJS officially doesn’t have a framework for UI designing, it’s all community and choice based you can whatever you like or don’t use them at all depending on the developer. There are a lot of options available, the best one is material ui by google, There’s also a bootstrap for ReactJS and various other options to explore.
Angular
It has a well defined UI framework for this called Angular Material which comes with pre designed beautiful components and they are fairly easy to use. All you need to do is read their documentation a bit and you are good to go. It’s a lot better than searching in the dark looking design framework and saves time too.
Setting It Up
ReactJS
You see since it doesn’t have a defined structure so it’s application development starts slowly there are a lot of things to consider and a lot of modules and libraries to add. It provides freedom to the developers. Its components are only of two types: functional and class based.
Angular
Setting up Angular is easy but each of the components are written in separate files. The only thing they share are services. For each component Angular needs three files to start with: HTML, CSS and TypeScript and later on you can add testing files. Regardless the components are reusable.
Handling Leftover
ReactJS only uses what is needed and no extra components are called unless they are needed. Whereas in Angular you had to link everything in a separate file and there are lots of unused modules just lying around, some of them are probably never used.
Faster the Better
ReactJS is a lot faster than Angular since it uses Virtual DOM it only renders the part of the UI which has changed leaving unchanged elements as is. Unlike Angular which uses its own mechanism to deal with DOM and renders the UI. Angular has changed detection for components.
State Management
ReactJS
Every component can have its own state and in ReactJS we manage these states with a State Management Library called Redux. Redux represents state as a single object and it can be updated at any location by reducers. Redux can be pretty complex at the start but is very crucial to learn.
Angular
Like everything else it has this inbuilt and uses services to manage the data. Services get initialized at the beginning of the application and are always available for the use. But in large applications this can be complex and we can also use several alternatives to the services like NgRx and Redux.
Market Stats
Angular was quite popular in the early days but in recent years ReactJS has totally gained the upper hand. It now has most users and is the most popular open source library and it continues to grow. Here are some stats from
Stack Overflow
Google Trends
NPM Downloads
Learning
There are three languages in common that you should know before starting with ReactJS or Angular i.e., HTML & CSS and JavaScript.
ReactJS
It is fairly easy to learn, it has no structure, no template, no complicated features.But remember it will take time to master it: you have to explore a lot since ReactJS does not offer anything you have to look for all the necessary modules and libraries you have to get good in using them as well sometimes connecting them with your project is tricky. Updating any ReactJS project is also easy.
Angular
It needs a lot of things to start. You have to be really good at the languages mentioned earlier then you need to have good working knowledge of TypeScript which is a whole other thing that takes time on its own. Now you are ready for some documentation, everything is there in docs. Angular is very rigid in this regard. You have to learn everything even if you don’t need to use it. Angular is a bit too complex; there are lots and lots of unnecessary complicated features that are linked to others. You simply cannot skip anything.
Updating Projects is also challenging. Updates are so frequent that it would appear that your knowledge of the previous version is wasted. Like happened with version 9 and version 10.
We would recommend all the beginners to go for ReactJS first then Angular.
Conclusion of this blog
Although Angular gives you everything that you need for building a project but the limitations and constant update and TypeScript makes it harder for a beginner to keep up with. ReactJS on other hand is simpler and only requires the working knowledge of JavaScript to start with. For a beginner who’s just starting should go with ReactJS.
Latest Data for Job Opening in Angular and ReactJS
By looking at the data you can say that there’s definitely a promising career in both Angular and ReactJS development. In recent years the demand for the ReactJS developer and Angular has drastically increased and will continue to that in later years as more and more companies opt for these two.
Start Your Learning of both or choose the one which you like the best from our React JS courses as well as Angular courses. Check them out below.
