What is the difference between Angular and React?

Manav Pandya

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22 Jul 2022

Beginner

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What is the difference between Angular and React?

If you are a software developer or front-end engineer and strive to learn new frameworks or libraries then amongst other Angular and React are the widely used terms nowadays in terms of single page application development. If any software developer or especially a fresher want to learn something new, they may have tons of question and it should be like why I need to learn, what kind of benefits I will get after learning that one, what are the pre-requisites for learning any framework or language, how much efforts they need to put and many more questions are there. Front-end development is pretty much evolved for the last few years, and if you are none of them then you will get to know about Angular and React soon into the coming years.

Front-end development mostly depends on the HTML, CSS, and the king “JavaScript” and by combining them we can design our front-end, hence React and Angular are the widely used platform for that. The major difference between React and Angular Is that, Angular is a framework developed by Google while React is a library that is developed by Facebook. Let’s see the major and important difference between Angular and React below.

Technology type

Both react and angular is based on JavaScript, but React is an open-source JavaScript-based library while angular is a complete framework written on TypeScript and supports other languages too. So the final choice to choose one of them is depends on the business requirement and the future project feasibility.

React applications can be written in TypeScript or JavaScript depending upon the business requirements while Angular is completely based on a strict typing approach using TypeScript along with Templates.

Application structure

As we have already discussed React is a JavaScript-based library, not a framework so it does not require to stick to a specific framework or structure. While angular is a full-fledge framework based on the Model View Controller approach so that with the use of the framework, we can architect our application in a good manner thus we can achieve better reusability and performance as well. Most of the case organizations choose Angular over React due to its immense support of well-distributed structure and ease.

Single page application support

When it comes to the complexity of the application, people choose to React for the batter single-page application candidate due to the flexibility of choosing useful components into the application. But when needed the complex application, Angular comes into action to remove the complexity aspect while developing and allow application fit to the enterprise structure and the volume.

Native mobile apps support

Now we know about the complexity and other aspects of web development, but our customer may need to have the mobile application for the same website that what are the options between Angular and react. So if you want to develop native mobile applications then React-native is amongst the first choice due to its performance and the easy approach of using JavaScript as native app development into the mobile platform. While Angular supports hybrid apps that can be useful for cross-platform mobile app development and provide rich features like components, gesture support, animation, and also multiple operating systems support.

Document object model (DOM)

Every front-end platform should render the elements into the dom at the end to produce an output. React uses Virtual-Dom it means when we do any modification of the elements like adding a new item, removing an item, or changing the behavior of the elements needs to be reflected into the DOM, for that react creates temporary dom and compares with the old dom and after comparing both of them the updated dom reflected into the browser. Angular used Regular dom so the changes applied to the elements will be applied to the actual dom directly.

Language supports

As we have discussed already that Angular is completely written on TypeScript as language support while React provides the support of JSX (JavaScript extension) out of the box which is built on top of JavaScript.

Dependency injection

We can use a dependency injection pattern to allow service to be injected into the component while in React, there is no support for the dependency injection.

The improvement of the Dependency Injection (DI) evolves so progressively which makes the Angular threat safe amongst other frameworks and libraries.

Data binding mechanism

Data binding is one of the popular concepts which allows elements to bind the values with the events and properties. Thus Angular supports two-way data binding which means when we change our input at that time it listens for the changes and passes it to the event in order to change the component modal values between the component and the template. While React, supports one-way it means after changing the value, we have to update the modal value because the modal state does not change automatically.

The two-way data binding is the most efficient technique for fetching the data from large enterprise or ERP-based software such as accounting, billing, e-commerce, and other software that demands a highly complex requirement. The bidirectional nature of Angular makes it easier to build an enterprise or largely scalable application that can be used by organizations.

Rendering

Being a framework or a library, it is important that how it gets rendered into the browser, in that case, both Angular and React supports client & server-side rendering on or other ways like using the function "renderToString()" or other ways that can be used to render the page on the server-side while Angular uses Angular Universal to serves the purpose.

Learning curve

Both angular and react are booming works so many of the developers are wanted to learn them quickly so that it gets benefited into their career. For learning React, we have to understand its core concepts like lifecycle, data binding, and most importantly JSX, but it’s not that tough, even newbies can get started quickly by using the free and online resources. Angular contains a large list of concepts to learn like component, lifecycle, data binding, pipes, directive, and so on so maybe the newbies can take some more time to compare to React in terms of “Time Constraint” otherwise nothing is impossible to learn if we follow the right direction. So far, we have seen the different aspects of comparing two huge candidates in the world of front-end development and after comparing each other we may get an idea that what to choose and when to apply.

When it comes to documentation, Angular may win the race as it has multiple categories, in-depth guidance, additional examples, and live code, while React documentation seems tidy and may not be liked by all at a time.

Summary

It’s too early to say that from Angular and React, this is the best and another one is the worst, but we can surely say that the future of both are highly impressive and may react to the higher in the front-end development world. In this article, we have seen what is the major difference between Angular and React its advantages and also drawbacks, the tools and configurations, platform support, and so on. I hope you got some idea by reading this in-depth guide about the goods and bad about them, I would recommend you to try both of them into your project and decide what to pick for the future perspective, Dot Net Tricks Angular 2 to 10 web API live interactive training aligned with real-time which is delivered by Google GDE and Microsoft MVP globally. The angular online training program helps you learn to build projects using web API ASP.NET MVC5 and node.js.Thanks for reading. till then Keep reading.