Angular vs. React: Which Framework is Best for Your Next Project?

What is Angular?

Angular is an all-in-one open-source JavaScript framework maintained by Google, to build highly reactive single-page applications. Like React, an Angular-based website will see all site changes made in the browser. Rather than communicating with a server to load data, a browser-side experience allows the page to render quickly with a more mobile-like experience. Angular, which recently saw the release of its newest version of Angular 9, is built on TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript.

Because React is a JavaScript library as opposed to the full JavaScript framework of Angular, many developers will add more libraries when using React to give it the functionality of a complete framework. Companies that use Angular include Nike, HBO, and Google, among others.  

Now, let’s get into more comparisons of React vs. Angular to build a greater understanding of which is the best choice for your next project

Virtual DOM vs. real DOM

The Document Object Model (DOM) is a type of API that acts as a web browser’s programming interface. Web pages are documents and the DOM represents these documents as nodes and objects so that programming languages can connect to and modify these pages. 

React uses a virtual DOM while Angular uses a real DOM. Why does that matter? The actual DOM is very slow and made even slower when re-rendering a page. The React team implemented a virtual DOM by rewriting the DOM in JavaScript. This virtual DOM re-renders only parts of an application that have been changed by a user’s actions. A full reload of the page is not required with the virtual DOM, making performance much faster.

Testing

Whichever framework your team uses, testing the code is imperative before deploying any program or application. Full testing in an Angular app is made simple with a single tool — either Protractor, Jasmine, or Karma. Testing in React, though, requires multiple tools for different types of testing — Enzyme might be used for component testing while a tool like Jest is used for code testing.

Performance

Most important for the future users of your application is the performance of the page itself. Load time and runtime impact how long customers will happily interact with your web page. 

While Angular is typically a fast framework, its bundle size, meaning the code generated and uploaded for deployment, tends to be large. With Angular now using the Ivy compiler, bundle size is shrinking. It’s also built with enough optimizations that users likely won’t encounter major performance issues on a larger Angular website. React tends to shine on smaller-sized apps as it’s built to prioritize certain page tasks over others so that it feels faster to the end-user. 

Ask any software developer whether you should opt for Angular or React and you’ll likely get a different response from each. Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to web frameworks and libraries, or how they’ll best benefit your project or company needs. Before opting for one tool over the other, begin experimenting with each by exploring Angular and React courses.