Angular is a web framework developed and maintained by Google that was released under the name of AngularJS back in 2010. At the time, it became one of the most popular web frameworks. This was mainly due to its features like two-way data binding and dependency injection, and of course by being backed by a tech giant.

In 2013, React, a JavaScript library supported by Facebook, became open-sourced. This framework popularized a concept in web development known as component-based architecture, that has many advantages like:

Modular and cohesive components, which make them heavily reusable and that contributes to accelerating the development time.

Used in mobile development, which allows developers to reuse the logical part in mobile apps, with only needing to tweak the view.

Easy maintenance and improvement, because components are self-contained.

React quickly took the market by storm and overshadowed most of the frameworks at the time, including AngularJS. Therefore, in 2016, Google upgraded it’s JavaScript framework as a consequence of the community’s enthusiasm with the component-based architecture: they called it Angular2.

Angular vs React: which one is more popular?

Before deciding on which framework to use, it’s wise to look at its popularity. The bigger and active a community is, the quicker it gets to find a solution for any unexpected problem that comes in your way. According to the data I was able to gather at the time of writing, different results arise in terms of how popular each framework is overtime.

On Github, while React’s repository has 164k stars, Angular had nearly 130k stars if we sum both AngularJS and Angular2 repositories. This shows that both have a very large community behind them, as they stay on the top of the most starred repositories.

Another interesting topic is the number of npm (Node Package Manager) downloads.

                                                     Number of npm downloads of Angular compared to React

As we can see in the above chart, React has more npm downloads than Angular since 2015. The number continues to grow, contrarily to Angular, which tends to stagnate.

                                                                             Web Frameworks Popularity

Assuming we check out Stackoverflow 2020 study, we can see that, regarding web frameworks, 35.9% of the respondents prefer React, while 25.1% use Angular instead. Further, this review additionally outlines that, despite being one of the most popular web frameworks, Angular is also considered the most dreaded one. In fact, Angular has more questions tagged than its rival. This might be explained because, in general, one can find Angular more complex than React. However, I didn't experience any trouble finding answers to the doubts or questions that came up, either for Angular or React.

                                                                 A job market comparison of Angular vs React

If we look at the above chart, we can see that Angular was ahead of React, in terms of the job market, until the end of 2015. At the time, Angular was a mature framework while React was still a new technology. More recently, with rampant popularity, React surpassed Angular, even with AngularJS and Angular2 combined.

This can be explained by a few factors such as:

React became older and developers began to dominate this technology.

React has a shorter ramp-up time, as it’s less complex than Angular.

React is more suitable for startups because it has less development time.

In summary, although React is more favored, we can see that both are very popular.

Purpose: Full fledged Framework - offers strong opinion on how your application should be structured and has many small libraries built-in that helps you build complex applications.

Data binding: Two-way data binding - meaning that if we change the input in the UI it will change the model state and vice versa.

Language: TypeScript - superset of JavaScript and statically typed language.

UI Components: Integrated Material Design Components - Angular provides various material design components, allowing an easy UI configuration.

Dependency Injection: Supports dependency injection - which allows it to have distinct lifecycles for different stores.

DOM: Incremental DOM - when creating the new DOM it will compare with the previous one and apply the differences to the “real” DOM, only allocating memory if necessary.

Learning Curve: Harder to learn - has a lot of concepts and syntax to learn.

Performance: Slower Performance - the "Real" DOM and bidirectional data binding process make Angular's performance slower than React. However, it may change with the addition and improvement of Ivy, a new technology .

Tools: Does not require additional libraries - integrates several functions, but can use NgRx and RxJS.

Purpose: Library - only cares about View on MVC architecture, need Flux to implement this architecture, but gives you more freedom the way you want organize the code.

Data binding: One-way data binding - meaning that an UI element cannot change the state of a component.

Language: JavaScript XML (JSX) - can be written in TypeScript, although not included natively.

UI Components: Material-UI Library & Dependencies - UI tools are developed by the community and offer a huge variety of UI components.

Dependency Injection: Does not entirely support dependency injection - React has a global state for all the components.

DOM: Virtual DOM - whenever the DOM changes it will create a new virtual DOM, compare with previous one and only modify the “real” DOM where it differs.

Learning Curve: Easier to learn - not as difficult since it has all the component's code in the same file

Performance: Faster Performance - the virtual DOM trees do not overload the browser. Plus, the unidirectional data binding process reduces the workload.

Tools: More dependent on a state management library - libraries such as Helmet, Redux, and React Router can optimize the state management processes, the interaction with the API, and routing.

Given such countless frameworks to choose from, every one with its own quirks, choosing for the right framework can turn into an intense mission.

We felt that before when we decided to build the application in Vue.js first and now when considering Angular.

At the point when we're between Angular or React, I think it generally comes down to personal preference, as they solve similar issues however with various implementation.

However, in the decision-making process, it’s important to consider that React has an easier learning curve, which leads to quicker development, while Angular has more built-in functionalities.

Both technologies are very powerful, a clear improvement from the early days of web programming that enhances, facilitates and speeds up developing.

In this article, I talked about Angular vs React based on a web app I developed from scratch, using both frameworks.

Let's find the comparison between Angular and React how to choose between both

Angular VS React: A comparison of both frameworks

Web development is the system of constructing and retaining an internet site for the net or an intranet that is accessed via a web browser and hosted on a server, either on on-premises hardware or within the cloud. This includes everything from single undeniable-text webpages as much as complicated net programs.

The primary techniques whilst developing a website include coding and web markup. But, there is a multitude of development tasks that still cross into net development, including scripting, safety configuration, content improvement, and eCommerce infrastructure.

Now we can discuss 8 Best Frameworks for Web development:-

React.JS is a JavaScript library, commonly used to develop software that is constantly refreshing data on its UI. This technology eliminates the need of reloading the whole screen and also avoids processing every single line of code. React JS allows you to create components made with JavaScript; the famous scripting language used to create interactive applications and interfaces. If you’re using an app that is constantly updating its data, then it was probably developed with JavaScript.

React Native for mobile apps: React supports different tech stacks and languages, allowing a combination of new features with existing code. For mobile development, you can use React Native — the React-based framework dedicated to hybrid mobile development (both iOS and Android).

Fast code rendering: React quickly interprets HTML-based code into the actual page layout. This framework for web development allows declarative views, updating the interface whenever the code is changed.

SEO-friendly: optimizing a single page to multiple keywords is difficult because index bots need to understand JS requests. React offers a set of instruments for helping indexation bots recognize the content of the page and optimize the site.

Complicated documentation — React is hard to navigate due to the high number of dependencies.

Space-consuming size: you need to install a lot of additional components and code collections to React efficiently.

Angular is a TypeScript based open-source web application framework used in building both web and mobile-based applications. In this article, we will go through some of the angular features by explaining some of its core APIs. You can follow this angular cheat sheet to build your project. We have tried to cover Angular CLI, Angular Lifecycle Hooks, Angular Routing, and much more here.

Great for Rich Internet Applications. RIA are web applications that aim to deliver desktop functionality on the browser. The client interface handles user interface and activity; the server-side is responsible for data processing. Angular uses HTML to build user interfaces and breaks functionality in modules, perfect for managing complex functionality.

Cross-browser availability: the framework supports the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Android, iOS.

Open-Source: Angular code is available for free under the MIT license. You can also upload free tools and plugins to the framework from the user-curated community.

Not adapted to mobile devices — although Angular technically supports iOS and Android browsers, users often report bugs on mobile versions.

Complicated Model-View-Controller Patterns. Typically in JS development, you write code from the controller perspective, not view (HTML). In Angular development, everything is HTML-centered.

Vue.js is a framework for frontend development, known for its high speed and flexibility. It’s mostly used for interactive interfaces of web applications and sites. Vue.js has a simple core functionality that can be improved with libraries, add-ons, and APIs. The Vue.js development services are based on data-reactive tools that can be integrated with other projects and libraries.

Single File Components: you can edit your styles and templates in a separate file. These components mark segments of the code, improve the codebase readability, and look similar to the actual front-end.

High scalability: Vue has a CLI project generator with an intuitive wizard which makes it easy to start a new project and transfer data from one codebase to another. You can improve the functionality of the generator according to your needs — Vue.js offers plenty of additional plugins.

Clear documentation: Vue docs are well organized and clear. API documentation is easy to find and read. It’s not a crucial difference, but the fact remains: other JS frameworks don’t live up to standards, set by Vue.js.

Difficult to learn: coding in Vue requires developers to learn practices that are untied to Vue, like directives. You can’t reuse that knowledge anywhere else or use previous JS experience to help yourself out. React, for instance, focuses less on specific features, and more on general best JS practices.

Small community: Vue.js doesn’t have many forums, free educational resources, courses, and videos. It’s fine if you want to distinguish yourself from other JS coders, but for beginners, it’s a big downside.

Svelte is a code compiler for transforming declarative components into imperative JS code. Unlike many JS frameworks, this one performs the majority of the work in the compiler rather than in the browser. The framework makes automated updates to the Document Object Model as soon as the state of the software changes.

Easy to read HTMLX syntax and templating system: these are elegant and fast to understand and read.

Flexible output: Svelte output code can be adopted to React and Vue. The framework chooses which bundles to write depending on the components used by your application.

Fast performance: Svelte has a reputation for being one of the fastest JavaScript frameworks out there. It can quickly resolve code performance issues (like minimizing dependencies) in the minimal runtime. With a powerful virtual DOM, Svelte can render frameworks without a single frame drop.

A small user community: even though Svelte is growing quickly, there’s not enough demand on the market, and educational resources are lacking as well. A lot more teams are adopting the framework, but it’s still an out-of-the-box solution rather than an established tech stack component for most web developers.

Not enough add-ons: compared to Vue.js and React.js that have thousands of add-ons for all types of projects and devices, Svelte falls behind in some integrations. The essential functionality of the platform, however well done, can’t substitute all these features.

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment built on the V8 engine. It has an open-source license and community. The framework runs on Linux, Mac OS, Windows, and other OSs. Its main advantage is that it can be used both to frontend and backend. You can use a single tech stack for the entire web project, or use Node.js for backend with other top web frameworks for the frontend — it’s up to you.

The same language for frontend and backend: Node.js code can be reused on the client and server sides.

Fast performance: V8 is faster than engines used by several other main programming languages, for instance, CPython. This is because Node.js development proceeds with the JIT compiler — the just-in-time compiler compiles bytecode to machine code while the program is running (it’s also used in Java).

Low efficiency of CPU-intensive performance: Node.js is a single-threaded language, which is why it does a poor job in handling CPU-intensive tasks (many tasks can’t be accomplished simultaneously).

Coding takes more time: while universality is Node.js’ most significant benefit, it’s also its main structural flaw. The framework is unnatural: creators took front-end-specialized JavaScript, and artificially tweaked it to fit the backend. No wonder that modules are often messy and redundant: for instance, you have nmp files that characterize the same functions.

Ember.js is a relatively new framework that took the list of popular web development frameworks by storm. The main reason for this spike in popularity is Ember’s rich functionality. In essence, it includes all the best features of the JS stack (Babel for ES2015 syntax support, Testem, and QUnit for unit and integration testing, etc.).

To work with Ember.js, you need to have the latest version of Node.js — they are available on the official website.

Efficiency: the framework uses Handlebars for navigation — one of the most efficient semantic builders on the market. It also features a live reload that shortens the time for request processing.

Big community: even though Ember.js is relatively new on the market, it already has a lot of contributors in the Open Source community and dedicated GitHub repositories.

Large ready library: Ember offers ready packages for routing, data management, dependency handling solution, and Ember Addon — a collection of official tools.

Complex internal logic: Ember’s component structure is complicated and can be counter-intuitive for beginners.

Slow development: complicated semantics slows down the development process, although Ember add-ons compensate for this.

If Angular’s specialty is mimicking the functionality of desktop applications, Backbone is considered the best web development framework for single-page applications. Web apps like Gmail or Twitter that don’t refresh pages are SPAs — they are fast and efficient.

The main characteristic of Backbone is that it depends only on the JS stack and uses a model-view-presenter. If the MVC controller is responsible for business logic, in this solution, the function is performed by the presenter.

Small size and flexibility: Backbone is one of the smallest and fastest frameworks, not only in JS stack but in web development overall;

Understandable functionality: Backbone uses event-driven algorithms to connect views and models, eliminating cluttered intermediate code. Also, you can connect it to REST APIs to sync the frontend with the backend.

Manual coding: Backbone offers a little amount of pre-set code compared to other JS frameworks.

Memory leaking: Backbone’s code sometimes fails to return the memory space that was occupied for temporary purposes. The applications continue to take up memory, and over time, there’s not enough space left. Developers need to identify and eliminate these bugs manually.

Meteor’s primary specialty is cross-platform applications. The framework supports different browsers and mobile devices — developers can reuse their tech stack and integrate other languages. It’s among the fastest and most universal website frameworks — here’s why.

Reactivity: Meteor is a comfortable framework with simple, often primitive syntax. It won’t help you write a complex web project, but it’s perfect for small projects. Due to its simplicity, Meteor quickly renders code and displays changes.

“Methods” make coding easier: Meteor uses methods to connect clients and servers. All requests, sent by a user, are processed via a method on the server-side. You can join a particular method to a specific type of user request, assuring a better performance.

Enables full-stack development: you can use Meteor for frontend, backend in connection to REST API, and mobile development.

Limited database support: for now, Meteor only works with MongoDB;

Documentation issues: Meteor’s documentation is lengthy and difficult to read.

Today we will discuss the Best Frameworks for Web development.

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Trending Blogposts on frameworks

Angular VS React: A comparison of both frameworks

8 Best Frameworks for Web development

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