AngularJS or ReactJS - Which One Is Better

Choosing the right platform for your web application is always important, there are a lot of frameworks which help you in building your website. Each framework has its own strengths which could be used for a particular web application.

Angular JS and React JS are some of the most popular frameworks for building a web application. And their comparison itself is one of the most interesting topics on the internet. And they also make It hard for the web app developers and entrepreneurs to choose one for their project.

Although there are many JavaScript frameworks available that a developer can choose from, to create an amazing web app, it's these frameworks which they go for.

Now, why is that?

To answer this, you must know about them first and then a comparo would answer which framework is better.

Chart below will give you a brief information about both the frameworks.

Angular JS

Angularjs is a JavaScript Web application framework originally created by Google, and it is actively supported by google and also a community of developers.

What was the idea behind Angular?

The idea was to combine well-known components, designs, patterns, and development practices into a single framework to address challenges encountered in developing a single page application.

To achieve this, Angularjs support standardized components such as models, views, controllers and services.

This Lead to angular making use of two important software design patterns, Model View Controller (MVC) and dependency injection.

This actually contribute in developing faster web applications with AngularJS.

Besides that, Angular makes use of many abstractions, paying attention to balancing modularity and complexity.

Why would anyone choose Angularjs?

It’s created by Google, which in all means makes it reliable.

Besides all that hype it has from google, Angular itself is a great platform for web applications.
Angular pretty comprehensive, which means if you are familiar with MVC or knockout or cappuccino you will have no trouble learning Angular’s testing API.

It is a complete solution for rapid front-end development, you wouldn’t need a plug-in or framework to build a data-driven web application.

It has effortless MVC implementation.
In the current market there are many other frameworks that implement MVC by asking you to divide your application into components, and then ask you to stand up together.

It does sound time consuming.

But you can sort it out, by implementing MVC by allowing you to split your application into MVC elements and it will automatically perform the rest of the work, it manages your elements and serves as the pipeline that integrates them.

As Angular JS is the mediator, you don’t have to worry about writing shortcuts between components.

Getting started with Angular is extremely easy!

Getting started with Angular is much easier than you think it is.

With a few attributes added to your HTML, your can have a simple angular app in no time.
As mentioned earlier, Angular JS is developed and maintained by Google and a community of developers, I am not going to discuss anything about the technical aspects but the Angular JS lets you extent HTML vocabulary.

React JS

React JS is indeed one of the most popular framework for developing web applications, which attracted a large and active community.

This resulted in a vast wealth of reusable components for it that will save your time when your coding, this library itself encourages writing loosely coupled code that is modular and composable.

Facebook created react, and they have chosen an architecture different from that of AngularJS but a similar MVC frameworks.

To be honest there is no particular structure for applications built with react.
React is indeed a large JavaScript library that helps us update the view for the user. But it won’t let you create applications on its own.

The library lacks the model and controller layer which is helpful to fill in the gap, Facebook introduced flux, which has numerous variants nowadays, to control the application workflow.

Things you need to know about react JS

It is one of the most popular client-side library or framework for building user interfaces, which are developed and also used by Facebook.

With React JS, you can organize your application around discrete components, with each handling its own rendering and state. Components can be nested within each other.

React is fast because it minimizes the number of writes to DOM which is the slowest part of any client side application.

The recommended way to write react code is by using JSX – an extension to JavaScript which presents components as HTML elements. JSX needs to be compiled to JS in order to work in browsers.

It hasn’t hit version 1.0 as of this writing, so there might be changes in the future.
We have a nice article with examples for learning react which you can check out. Also there is the official getting started guide.

Let’s get into the comparison of Angularjs vs React JS

Frameworks for Web application development have similarities, because at the end of the day they are meant to create a web application, since the final product which is a web application but different functions and methods of creation are differ, there are certain dis similarities.
When we compare Angularjs vs React JS, the difference can be found in the following aspects.
· Data binding
· Componentization
· Performance
· Dependency resolution
· Directives and templating

Data Binding

Data binding is an important tool used by developers to populate user interfaces with model data.

There are many ways to bind data, each with their own benefits and costs. important factors include performance, data flow and code complexity

Angular JS

Angular uses two-way data binding which connects Document object model or DOM values to model data.

In short, if the user interacts with an <input> field and provides a new value to the app, then both the view and also the model are updated.

It is true that two-way data binding is beneficial for AngularJS as it helps you to write less boilerplate code to create interactions between components in your app.

You don’t have to create or invent a new method to track changes in the app and change your JavaScript code every time.

But there is a drawback to this, Angular’s two-way data binding approach is its negative impact on performance.

Angular by default creates a watcher for each binding. And also during the development, we may come to a point when an app is packed with too many watchers for bound elements.

React JS

We have learnt that Angular uses two-way data binding, but react doesn’t if uses single way of data binding. And developers say that React has an advantage over Angular regarding the data binding method.

What are the advantages of ReactJS over AngularJS with regards to Data binding?
Since react uses one-way data binding, which means you will be able to direct the flow of data only in one direction. Because of this, it’s always clear where the data was changed which doesn’t happen with Angularjs. It’s worth noting that two-way data binding was available in react before V15 thanks to Reactlink.

In order to implement a unidirectional data flow in React, Facebook created its own application architecture called flux.

Flux controls the flow of data to react components through one control point which is the dispatcher. So, flux dispatcher receives an object which is called as an action and transfers it to an appropriate store, which then updates itself.

Once the update is finished, the view changes accordingly and sends a new action to the dispatcher. It’s only possible to transfer an action to the store when its fully updated.
With this concept, flux improves the effectiveness of the code base. Based on our own experience we can say that flux is great when you work with dynamically updated data.

One-way data flow in react keeps complexity under control. It’s much easier to debug self-contained components of large react applications that it is with similarity large AngularJS applications.

Componentization

AngularJS

Angular has three layers which makes it a complex and fixed structure. The layers are as follows
· Model
· View
· Controller

To transform the code into HTML to create the view for the user, an object scope is responsible for the model part which is initialized by the controller.

Angular provides many standard services, factories, controller, directives and other components that will take a while for a developer to master initially.

In AngularJS the application code is broken into several files.
Let me make it simple for you. For example, when you create a reusable component with our own directives, controller and template, you should describe each chunk of code in a separate file. But once we describe our directive, we then add a link to our template in the directive to couple these parts.
AngularJS directives represent the template logic for your application. The template is HTML extended with AngularJS directives, generally written as tags or attributes.
You can also add controllers to provide our models with necessary $scope or context. Controllers are written in separate files as well. When you modularize your application in such a way, you can reuse your template or component in a different part of the website.
ReactJS

We already know that the architecture of Angular is complex compared to React, but in-fact there is no proper code structure for applications built with react.
React lacks the model and controller layers. So to fill in the gap, Facebook introduced flux, which has numerous variants nowadays, to control the application workflow.

React provides an easy way to build component trees. It also boasts a functional programming style where component definitions are declarative. Composing your app from react components is like composing a JavaScript program from functions.

Since react doesn’t demand you to write the code in a particular pattern, it’s easy for the developer to adapt to react and find his own way of creating apps easily.

The freedom offered by ReactJS is much better than AngularJS, which makes it a clear winner.

Performance

AngularJS

As mentioned earlier, Angular 1.X and higher relies on the two-way data binding and we know it lags a bit. So, when we bind the values in HTML with our model, AngularJS creates a watcher for each binding to track changes on the DOM.

Soon after the view is updated, angular compares loop then checks not only values that have actually changed, but also all other values that are tracked through watchers. Too many watchers are the reason for decrease in the performance.

This drawback is even more painful when several values are dependent on each other. If you make any changes in the values, then it stops and runs it all over again. The loops don’t stop working until it checks all watchers and applies all necessary changes both the view and the model.

The lack of performance is the reason why Angular 2 supporters re-worked how Angular changes the program state. Because of the poor performance of the previous versions of Angular, Angular 2 and 4 frameworks versions also feature server-side rendering and one-way data binding similar to react.

For the ones who would still want two-way data binding, it is still available as an option.

React JS

Developers of React have introduced the concept of virtual document Object Model, which is regarded as one of the greatest advantages of react in comparison with mature frameworks, which includes AngularJS.

So how does the DOM work?
When you upload a HTML document, React creates a lightweight DOM tree from JavaScript objects and saves it on the server.

So when the user, for instance, enters new data in the <input> field in the browser, React creates a new virtual DOM and compares it with the previously saved DOM. The library finds dissimilarities between two object models in such a way and rebuilds the virtual DOM once again, but with new changed HTML. All this work is done on the server, which reduces load on the browser.

Now, instead of sending completely new HTML on the browser, React sends the HTML only for the changed element. This approach is much more efficient that what AngularJS offers.

Since react doesn’t use watchers to track changes and it is one-way data binding, you can create some really quick apps, which also doesn’t mean AngularJS makes slower apps.

Resolving Dependencies

AngularJS

It’s a known fact that AngularJS uses a basic OOP pattern called dependency injections, which means you can write dependencies in a separate file.

If you ask me, It’s a pain to create a dependency directly in an object. In Angular dependency injection is inherent to any standard functions that we declare for an angular factory or service. We only pass dependencies as parameters in any order in our functions.

ReactJS

There is a major difference between a React and Angular regarding dependency injection, which is React doesn’t offer any concept of built-in container for dependency injection.

But it also doesn’t mean you have to think of a method to inject dependencies in your react project. You can use several instruments to inject dependencies automatically in a react application.

Instruments such as Browserify, RequireJS, EcmaScript 6 modules which we can use via Babel, ReactJS-di, and many more.

But you would face a challenge in picking one.

Directives and Templating

AngularJS

Directives in AngularJS are a way to organize your code around the DOM. When you are working with Angular, you can access the Dom only through directives.
For examples, AngularJS has many standard directives, such as ng-bind or ng-app, you can create your own directives as well. This is a powerful way to work with the Dom.

On the other hand, the syntax for making private AngularJS directives is rather difficult to understand.

You make your own directives in AngularJS to insert data into templates. The template must have an element with our directive written as an attribute. It’s as simple as that!

But you know what? AngularJS directives, if defined fully, are sophisticated. The object with settings, which we return in the directive, contains around ten propertied. Such properties as templateURL of template are easy to understand.
In a nutshell, if you want to bind DOM elements with AngularJS applications, we use directives, both standard and specific.

ReactJS

React isn’t as generous as AngularJS, it doesn’t offer division into templates and directives or template logic.
The template logic should be written in the template itself.
Did you guys know, some of the most popular web apps we use every day are made of these amazing frameworks.

Let’s start with an example of Angular JS.

YouTube

I’m sure most of you already guessed it. Yes, YouTube is the best video streaming app from google which I believe is the best of all the websites created on AngularJS.
It lets you stream and upload videos, most of them are for Free!
I don’t think there is any other video streaming web app which comes close to YouTube in terms of design and build.

There are many popular web applications built on AngularJS, here are a few of my personal favorites
· Netflix
· Freelancer.com
· Landsend.com
· MallZee and many more.

An example for React.js

Instagram

Although Facebook should’ve been an ultimate choice, but all of you already know that.
Yes, Instagram is build using React.js.
Instagram is a social networking website where a user can share pictures and videos which are under a minute in length.

What made Instagram famous?
It’s the filters which make your pictures look more stunning, also there are new features added such as “Insta stories” and “Insta Live” which are also standard features on Facebook.

Conclusion

While there are a large number of differences between AngularJS and ReactJS, they can still be used to create a similar app. I wasn’t biased towards any of the platform or declared a clear winner. Because it is a hard choice to make and each of them are good at that they do.

But if you still ask me what would I choose? My answer would be React and it’s just my personal choice. And the reason behind it that I have to write less code to get what I want in React.
Despite that, Angular is a much better featured framework than what React is. Because of the support which is readily available in the programming community. And React is still getting started, to reach where Angular is.