Aug 16th, 2024
Angular Vs React, What is the Best Technology for My Project in 2024?
Choosing an appropriate framework for your web development projects is essential, and in 2024, Angular and React continue to be leading choices. Each offers well-defined strengths and features tailored to cater various requirements. In this article we discuss Angular vs React, aiding you in choosing the most suitable framework for your 2024 projects.
When it comes to front-end web development, there’s no denying that React is the king of the JavaScript frameworks. Right now, over 13 million of the world’s approximately 2 billion websites and software applications use the framework.
React is preferred by about 40% of respondents when questioned, with Angular coming in at around 17%, and NextJS in third place with 16%. Angular is still a popular choice for many web developers, and there are plenty of reasons you might choose Angular over React for your next software development project.
In this article, we’ll look at Angular vs React in 2024: what they are, how they work, the key differences between them, and use cases for each.
What is Angular?
Angular is a free, open-source JS framework developed by Google. It is built on Typescript and comprises a component-based architecture, meaning it allows you to build discrete components that can be reused throughout an application’s UI.
Angular also includes a collection of libraries to assist you with building routes, forms, authentication components and more. It comes with a suite of developer tools that help you build, test, and maintain code.
What is React?
React is a free, open-source JS library developed by Meta (formerly Facebook.) Like Angular, it allows you to build reusable UI components for display, routing, authentication, web forms, and more. React utilizes its own language JSX which lets you build HTML-like components inside your JavaScript code.
Angular vs React: Key Differences and Advantages
The key difference between React and Angular is that Angular is a framework and React is a library. What does that mean? A library is essentially a collection of modules that contain helper functions, methods, objects, classes, etc. A framework is a fully-fledged structure that dictates how your app should be laid out and also includes modules with helper functions, etc. This means that Angular is more opinionated in how your code should be structured and organized.
It also means that Angular comes with everything you need to develop an application, while React will need to be extended through various libraries in order to achieve the same result. To create routes between pages, for example, you will need to add React Router to React, while Angular comes with routing right out of the box.
Another key difference between React and Angular is the method by which they update the DOM and manage data. Angular utilizes a two-way data-binding system, meaning that changes to the data model update the UI, and changes to the UI update the data model. React, on the other hand, uses one-way binding and a virtual DOM. The virtual DOM keeps a version of the DOM in memory and then updates or “reconciles” the real DOM with that state.
Both React and Angular are supported by major companies, meaning updates are consistent and new features are rolled out regularly. There is a large community of UI UX developers associated with each framework, who can answer questions through online forums.
Based on the points on Angular vs React, the conclusions can be summarized in the table format below:
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Use cases for each
Angular has a slightly steeper learning curve than React and can be more difficult to use. It also has a larger bundle size, but that’s only because React doesn’t come with everything you need. React is more flexible and less opinionated, but you will need to install lots of dependencies in order to do everything you can do with Angular out of the box.
One key advantage of using React over Angular is that learning the React ecosystem makes it easier to learn React Native, which allows you to build native apps for iOS and Android. While familiarity with React is not required to learn React Native, it does help to pick up the framework faster.
Conclusion
Both React and Angular can be used to build complex, highly performant web apps. At the end of the day, whether you choose Angular over React will largely come down to personal preference and which framework makes most sense to you. The conventions of one might be difficult to wrap your head around vs the other. Our suggestion is that you test both by spinning up a simple app in each, and poke around at the features to see which one jives with you.
