5 Reasons to choose Angular over React
There is no right or wrong when it comes to choosing a framework, every framework has its pros and cons that make it unique, its no different with two of the most popular frontend frameworks Angular and React. React has no doubt more fan following as compared to Angular, but Angular has some pros that makes it a better choice, this article highlights the 5 reasons to choose Angular over React.
1. TypeScript
Angular apps are built with TypeScript because it comes preinstalled with Angular and brings all the benefits of type safety built in, while React also supports TypeScript, it can be a hassle to update due to a version mismatch or deprecations. TypeScript increases producitivity and efficiency of application development lifecycle and makes working with and maintaining bigger enterprise grade applications much easier.
2. Angular Material
Angular Material is a UI component library following google material design specification and provides out of the box components to expedite the application development process. Angular Material library is part of the Angular framework and is maintained by the Angular team.
You can view the demo of the components here: https://material.angular.io/components/categories
3. Separation of Concerns
Angular keeps the TypeScript component and html template files separately as compared to JSX in React where you need to write JavaScript and html in the same file, while some people might prefer this approach, it doesnt work well when you have bigger and complex html templates to maintain.
4. Reactive Programming
Angular makes good use of reactive programming approach and comes with RxJS library, and provides an array of methods similar to functional programming that make working with data streams and asynchronous events much easier. It follows design patterns that are scaleable and reduce data latency specially in real-time applications. You must have a good grasp of reactive programming to be able to work with Angular. While it becomes difficult to manage subscriptions at times, it is much easier once you get a hang of it.
5. Faster Development Cycle
Application development is much higher with Angular as compared to React, because Angualr Material provides out of box and ready to use UI components that are faster to implement, Angular also comes with a lot of built in directives and pipes that expedite the development process. In case of React, you have to leverage third party libraries that could be a hassle due to update mismatch, while Angular maintains all the libraries within the framework and makes update process much smoother. Angular apps have a modular architecture and provide options to lazy load modules.
All of the above pros doesn’t mean that Angular is perfect! and I think no framework is perfect, React is no doubt light weight but as the application grows and you add more third party libraries to it, the bundle size of React grows as well. I think it all depends on the application requirement and development team. Overall I believe Angular is a good choice for enterprise grade B2B applications.
