In my earlier post, I have written about jQuery vs AngularJS. Now we are going to see React vs Angular.

You are living in an era where each new technological concept is the need of the hour to inject something new into your business. Every latest technology over the web comes with its associated pros and cons and thus it is mandatory to look out for each minor concept before adopting any web technique in your business app.

ReactJS and AngularJS are two major front-end technologies with unique identity and a great significance in the app development environment. A major advantage of using AngularJS is that it is shareable and reduces the effort of writing much code. Whereas, in ReactJS, all the UI updates can be handled automatically and it implements JavaScript to create components with JSX implementation.

What is ReactJS and AngularJS

AngularJS is a comprehensive JavaScript framework that provides a complete set up  to build a robust and feature-rich web application. Like all frameworks, it provides a programming pattern is called MVC structure that helps streamline and standardize the entire web development workflow.

React, also called as ReactJS, is an open-source JavaScript library that plays a big role in rendering views. While AngularJS provides the model, view, and controller as being a full frameworks, React is an extensive library that caters only to the view. With one-way data binding, there are so many competitive advantages of using this technology over others.

When to Use ReactJS and AngularJS

About ReactJS

• React is the best choice when you have lots of dynamic content changing within the view. It is like a struggle today over the web to render large lists of items within a single view where, half a second delay is all it takes to kill your user experience.
• As a library, React can also be used as the view component of AngularJS or other frameworks, because it does not bound you to a specific technology stack.
• React is also a perfect choice for those who are familiar with ClojureScript and its immutable data structures.

About AngularJS

Read more about how to install Angular 4.0 using CLI

• If you need a full, comprehensive framework for your development process to run smooth, using AngularJS will work in an exciting way and will get you run quickly out of the box. Comparing a library to a framework is not feasible and they can be used interchangeably.
• React is not backwards compatible with browsers older than IE8. It is a dilemma creating aspect to know whether React is worth to be used when your project is either a simple webpage or AngularJS might appear more capable of rendering your view.
• With the recent release of Angular 2.0 on May 2, 2016, the users are shipped with an expanded performance boost, including server-side rendering support and a similar approach to use one-way data binding for only manipulating the parts of the DOM that need to be changed.

Basic Features and Technology Used

Advantages of ReactJS and AngularJS

What AngularJS offers

• Hassle-Free Decision MakingBeing a complete framework, AngularJS provides significantly extraordinary opinions and functionality. It helps the users work more quickly without being worried for the decisions.

• Component StructureAngularJS 2 has originated from a framework to a strong platform and its components can also be used swiftly with other frameworks. Extended functionality can be implemented via the shape of components that fully accomplish it, and also as directives that can expand the functionality of the currently available components.

• Development EnvironmentYou have the ease to select your most preferred environment with AngularJS. While TypeScript is the most preferred choice, you have an ease to use CoffeeScript, Dart or JavaScript. For templates, pure HTML or pre-processors such as Jade can be used as well.

• TestingPrimarily, AngularJS was built to make test writing for the applications an easy task, especially when you are utilizing the modules, as stated in the official documentation. Thus, AngularJS can be considered more advantage with utmost testing ease that gives one more reason to the developers to opt AngularJS.

What ReactJS offers

• JSXJSX has a syntax that looks similar to HTML and compiles to JavaScript. Markup and codes both are attached together in a single file for JSX. Also, string-based templates of AngularJS have few limitations, like no code coloring in multiple editors, less support for code completion, and some sort of run-time failures as well that make React lead.

• Great User InterfaceUnlike AngularJs, ReactJS Native has a lot more focus on UI. It allows an extremely responsive interface for the users with the use of JavaScript interactions across the device’s Native environment and ReactJS Native. This results in the increased load time of application and helps run it smoothly without any sort of obstacles.

• Extremely EfficientVirtual DOM creation by ReactJS gives developers utmost relaxation and brilliant performance because React calculates what kind of changes are required in the virtual DOM in prior and the DOM-trees are updated accordingly. Via this way, ReactJS reduces the expensive DOM operations and updates are done efficiently.

React Vs Angular

Wide Community Support

This aspect is enough to treat AngularJS as a leading front-end technology. A wide global community is available all the time to give support and helps AngularJS developers, which increases the reliability and credibility of AngularJS. JavaScript developers loves this technology and shifting towards this big thing.

Full Framework

AngularJS codes are robust and platform independent. When compared with React, almost all Angular components are pretty mature. AngularJS, genuinely uses intensive and careful reinventions to give developers a flexibility for creating the projects by anticipating the requirements. ReactJS uses a bunch of libraries that are time- consuming and makes the team effort’s stuff never ending.

Less Fatigue

AngularJS is fully-fledged framework that gives utmost flexibility to do anything in your design. React, on the other hand, needs a set of libraries to perform even the basic things required in every application. Anyone can get into the app or the dev team due its consistency. When compared to the React, AngularJS stays on the top with its out of the box nature.

Two way binding

Even a slight change in the data can affect the UI and vise versa, no extra effort is needed to sync the data in the view and model. On the other side, ReactJS is unidirectional and DOM is to be flushed or injected with the new updates.

Fast rendering

ReactJS renders faster than AngularJS and uses several smart tactics to minimize the number of costly DOM operations required to UI update. ReactJS also uses the virtual DOM and avoids reconciling the DOM. Parallel showcasing in single DOM itself plays a big role in achieving the same.

Fails on Error and Explicit

ReactJS throws error on itself upon compilation, where the JSX compiler specifies the line number where the typo occurred. This helps the developer debug easily by saving valuable development time. On the flip side, AngularJS fails at the run time rather than compile time and can confuse the coder.

Conclusion

Although both Angular and React are the robust technologies of today, there is a vast difference in terms of features and usage that keep both of them apart. While one is a feature-rich framework, other is an extensive library that helps in making robust web solutions. One cannot be named as the leader in this battle of technologies. In different perspective, both of them can be used in the best possible way to meet the requirements.