What are the Pros and Cons of AngularJS vs ReactJS?

It is not a secret that developing native mobile applications may be more difficult than building on the web. It is often a more time- and labor-consuming process. Each developer should be armed with a set of handy and effective tools in order to create awesome apps. In this article, we are going to compare ReactJS and AngularJS for better understanding of what we can operate while working at various development projects.

Currently ReactJS and AngularJS are the most outstanding JavaScript frameworks. Angular was developed by Google, and React is Facebook’s creation. Both of them are innovative and thus widely used for creating mobile and web applications and making the process of building apps as much simple and powerful as it can be. Code library React Native was released on 2013, as compared to Angular, which showed up in 2009. They allow building excellent applications for specific operating systems. Well, what are the fundamental differences between these two tools? Let us look into it.

First of all, it would be fair to say that these two instruments are not fully comparable. ReactJS is not actually a framework, but an open-source JavaScript library. It provides the possibility to create apps that are updated from time to time without the need to reload the page. This partial update technology is quite a convenient and topical tool for developers who are creating single-page applications It supports virtual DOM, but not only browser’s DOM, allowing defining the most effective way to update one. Thus, the main aim of it is boosting speed and simplicity of developing process. React is here to resolve an issue that is common for all JavaScript frameworks – rendering a huge amount of data. Its productivity is the best one among all other JavaScript frameworks.

Read also: How to Make a Mobile App with ReactJS?

As for AngularJS, it is an open-source framework for creation of web applications that consist of one HTML page with CSS іn JavaScript. Its role lies in widening browser apps on MVC base, as well as simplification of their development and testing. AngularJS does not make you stick to one application structure, allowing you using lazy initialization for shortening loading time. Although data presentation in Angular has quite a compact view, it loses out to React in terms of processing huge amounts of data. However, in some cases Angular is particularly useful.
Another difference between these two lies in application architecture. Angular.js initially used architectural pattern MVC (Model–View–Controller), but later switched to MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel). ReactJS uses only V (View) pattern, since it focuses on data rendering, while leaving all other components to discretion of the developer. These peculiarities lead to the thought that it may be reasonable to combine Angular and React for effective work under your projects.

With Angular, you use directives for creation of applications, blending CSS, JS, and HTML codes; with React, you use JavaScript only, using JSX syntax that allows blending HTML within your JavaScript code.

Now that we have examined essential differences between Angular and React, let us outline key pros and cons of both of them.

ReactJS

Pros:

1. It is quite easy to be mastered.
2. It is easy to maintain isolated components in React.
3. Constant re-rendering of components provides efficient arranging at increasing complexity.
4. Convenient architecture – Flux – is highly competitive to MVC. One-way data flow provides maintainability and efficient arrangement of data and DOM elements.
5. It is the most light-weighted framework among the ones that are widely used today.

Cons:

1. Some issues with DOM manipulation libraries are possible (e.g., jQuery).
2. Frequent re-rendering may slow down the work of application at handling a large set of data.

AngularJS

Pros:

1. Good documentation.
2. Two-way data binding simplifies some parts of the process.

Cons:

1. Two-way data binding checks for changes in the data model, which may lead to possible issues with performance and faster draining the battery of the device.
2. Difficulties with understanding the code and debugging.
3. Substantial framework size.

ReactJS provides wide possibilities for native mobile development. Being a part of open-source library, it encourages developers from all over the world to contribute into common ideas and sharing skills, thus allowing obtaining interesting and innovating products. You may use React to build web sites and native applications for iOS and Android. The fact that Facebook, Google, GitHub, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter and many other pace-setters use React code, speaks for itself.

React Native is successfully used for creation of native web applications, while using standard platform components like Drawer for Android and UITabBar for iOS. All actions between JavaScript code and native platform are conducted asynchronously, and additional threads may be used for native modules as well. This endows React Native with fluidness and responsiveness.
React introduces a novel, radical and functional approach to construction of user interfaces. In brief, the application UI is simply expressed as a function of the current application state. React offers a brand new approach to construction of user interfaces.

Below are some examples of iOS and Android native apps, created with ReactJS:
Facebook Ads Manager helps you with managing your advertisements posted on Facebook pages and gives you advanced advertisement tools to push up sales and draw attention to your goods and services.

Movie Trailers by MovieLaLa that helps you watching the recent and the best trailers for films. You may also make comments and chat with movie fans from all over the world.

Eat or Not is an app that may be quite useful for anyone who cares about healthy nutrition, well-being and active lifestyle. The app contains BMI calculator, calories counter and recommendations as for some domestic and specialized sports activities in terms of losing calories.

To sum it all up, the most effective development work is associated with operational mixture of many tools and instruments, and frameworks and libraries are of no exception. Although both AngularJS and ReactJS definitely have their pros and cons, they are not equal comparisons, and React seems to be literally “reactive” and noteworthy one. We would recommend looking closely at React while building your mobile applications, since it combines the most effective tools and methods of present-day outstanding libraries and frameworks.

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