Whenever a new web development project begins, the developers have to make several decisions that will affect how they’ll tackle it. Some of those decisions are crucial for the end product to be fully functional, easy to maintain and highly upgradeable. Among them, there’s one that has become essential – picking the right technology to develop the software.
A quick Google search will show you that there’s no agreement whatsoever around this point. While Angular development companies will obviously go with Angular, there are other developers that will pick React hands down. Of course, there’s a third group that won’t go with either but, for the purposes of this article, let’s focus on both of those technologies, as the comparison between them is a hot topic of discussion.
Which is weird, by the way. How so? Because we’ll be comparing a framework (Angular) with a library (React), which might render the comparison useless. However, the debate is somewhat valid, mostly because both technologies can be used to leverage front-end development in one way or another. So, here are the 6 main differences between them, which will hopefully help you pick one or the other in your next development project.
1 – App structure
This is a huge difference, so we’ll get to it right away. Angular’s structure is a full-featured MVC framework, while React is just more of the V in that acronym. MVC stands for Model-View-Controller and is a software design pattern used to develop user interfaces by dividing the program logic into those three interconnected elements.
Thus, Angular uses the whole pattern and divides the internal representation of the information into those 3 components. This makes it easier to manipulate since MVC architectures provide a more structured code that’s simpler to work with, especially in complex projects.
React, for its part, only focuses on the View representation, which means that it doesn’t enforce an app structure by itself. This provides the developer with the freedom to decide the app’s structure itself, which means there are fewer limitations but more coding work.
2 – Development speed and productivity
The way in which developers can work with either technology is also a major difference since it impacts on development speed and overall productivity. Thus, Angular developers feel like they got the winning hand here, as Angular’s command-line interface allows for one-line commands and clean coding features thanks to the work alongside TypeScript. This allows them to create workspaces and applications quickly.
When it comes to React, the development is affected by the need to work with third-party libraries. Since React developers have to define the right architecture with the tools suitable for each project, it takes significantly more development time to get to the final product. This worsens when the project is handed to new developers, as they need to figure out the tools and libraries that were used in the first place.
3 – Learning curve
Whenever you are about to embark on a new project, choosing easy-to-work tools is a must. That’s why we need to take a look into the learning curve for both Angular and React. Naturally, Angular development services and React professionals have enough experience to know their way around these tools, regardless of how complicated they might be. However, easier technologies will ensure you’ll find seasoned professionals to work in your project.
With that out of the way, it’s important to note that React developers need to know 3 basic things to work with it: essential React workings, a routing library, and a state management library. The essential React working includes writing components, managing internal states, and using props for configuration. After having all those things figured out, any developer is ready to build apps with React.
For its part, Angular has a higher learning curve and entry barrier. That’s because anyone wanting to work with this framework has to start with the basics (directives, modules, decorators, components, services, dependency injection, pipes, and templates) and then move to more advanced topics (zones, AoT compilation, change detection, and even Rx.js). As you can see, there’s a lot of new concepts to learn to master Angular, so it can be confusing for developers that haven’t worked with it.
4 – Data Binding
Data binding marks an important distinction between Angular and React. This is the process that establishes a connection between the app’s UI and business logic. Thus, whenever data changes its value, all elements linked to it reflect those changes. An example can be the user editing a value in a text box, which will be automatically updated in the underlying data.
The difference in data binding for Angular and React is that the latter uses a one-way binding while the former uses two-way binding. Let’s explain this a little bit. React uses a one-way binding, which means that the model state is updated first and then the changes are reflected in the UI element tied to said state. Changing the UI element, however, won’t change the state.
On the other hand, Angular uses a two-way binding. That means that changes in the UI elements are reflected in state changes and vice versa. Two-way means that the process can go either way with the same result. This makes it easier to understand, however, React’s one-way binding is better for data overview, which makes debugging much easier.
5 – Regular and virtual DOMs
DOM stands for Document Object Model, which is an interface that treats an HTML document as a tree structure where each node is an object. Each “branch” ends in a node, and each node contains an object. This is used, for instance, to render HTML pages through web browsers. The browsers download the HTML and parse the tree to display the page on-screen.
Now that that’s clear, it’s time to see how these technologies use DOMs. React uses a virtual DOM, which makes it incredibly fast. That’s because this kind of DOMs only updates the parts that actually change when compared with previous versions of the tree.
Angular, on the other hand, uses a traditional DOM, which updates the entire tree structure until it reaches the part that actually changes from previous versions. This drastically affects its performance, especially in applications that need to handle hundreds of data requests. While React will respond to those requests quickly and effectively, Angular would take a lot of time to process them.
6 – Testing
Finally, there are the testing capabilities of both Angular and React. As any Angular web development company surely knows, the framework is amazing at testing and debugging, since it can work with the entire project thanks to the included tools (Jasmine, Protractor, and Karma). All of these make possible different types of testing, such as end-to-end testing and unit testing.
React is quite the contrary. Developers working with this technology will require an extra set of tools to perform different types of testing on their projects. Thus, they’ll need Jest for Javascript testing, Enzyme for component testing, React-unit for unit testing, Skin-deep for Render testing utils, and many more. This means that testing in React requires extra effort and time, which adds up to the final cost of development with this technology.
Should you use Angular or React?
After reading these differences, you might feel like hiring an Angular development outsourcing company is the way to go. After all, it feels like a more complete solution for front-end development. However, things aren’t that linear in this comparison. There are times when React will be a more suitable choice for development, even in spite of its drawbacks. Thus, it’s important to see what kind of projects are more appropriate for one or the other.
Angular, for its part, is great for developing cross-platform mobile apps, since it was created with this purpose in mind and has enough features to work with navigation via touch, changing screen sizes, and mobile hardware. It’s also a good option to create progressive web apps and hybrid mobile apps, because of its inclusion of a mobile toolkit that makes mobile development easy and quick.
React, on the other hand, is ideal for custom projects, simply because it’s more limitation free. That means that React is perfect for developing dynamic applications, thanks to the use of virtual DOMs. Additionally, it’s a good choice to design single-page apps that can be updated dynamically, in real-time and without having to refresh the whole page. Finally, React is good for native mobile apps, since it allows to create apps in Javascript with a notable performance.
As you can see, rather than seeing them as mutually exclusive, it’s best to see Angular and React as part of an essential toolkit for developers. That’s because both of these technologies have their pros and cons, and they’ll work best for certain projects. Now that you know that, better team up with developers for both of them, as your upcoming projects might need the expertise of both!