React vs Angular:
a comprehensive comparison & use cases

Development speed

Both Angular and React enable developers to build web applications’ frontends fast thanks to their component-based architecture, code reusability, and strong community support. However, Angular additionally provides a complete out-of-the-box developer toolkit that saves developers’ time on setting up project structure, configuring tools, and managing common app functionalities. The framework’s declarative, template-based approach also helps generate less boilerplate code and reduces developers’ efforts, streamlining the development workflows.

React, in turn, features a lightweight, JSX-based syntax and a flexible ecosystem that lets developers choose only the tools they need, reducing unnecessary complexity and speeding up the development process.

App performance

Applications built using both Angular and React can perform well, with differences between them often negligible as the two technologies offer several mechanisms to improve app speed.

Due to its full-featured nature, Angular typically produces larger code bundles needed for initial app rendering, resulting in longer load times. This framework also relies on real DOM, meaning that a page needs a full re-render when a change is made to it. As a result, apps can perform slower and become less responsive, especially in the case of complex web pages or interfaces with frequent updates. However, Angular improves app speed through Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation, which converts TypeScript into optimized JavaScript before the application reaches the browser. Angular’s dependency injection, lazy loading, and change detection mechanism further optimize app performance by minimizing unnecessary updates to the user interface.

Compared to Angular, React has a smaller bundle size, which results in fast load times and smoother user experience. In addition, React’s virtual DOM and features like concurrent rendering and memoization help optimize how and when UI components are re-rendered, speeding up interface updates. This makes React particularly well-suited in apps with dynamic, highly interactive interfaces.

Security features

Angular offers built-in security features, including cross-site scripting (XSS) protection and content security policy (CSP) compatibility, to protect web apps against common vulnerabilities. What’s more, Angular’s default testing tools help developers review apps’ security-critical behavior, validate safe content rendering, and prevent the reappearance of security vulnerabilities once fixed. In addition, the use of TypeScript adds an extra level of security by reducing type-related coding errors that can potentially lead to unintended vulnerabilities.

In contrast, React provides few built-in protections and doesn’t have mechanisms to handle security concerns directly. Instead, securing an application depends heavily on developers who should implement security best practices, ensure proper configuration of additional libraries, and integrate third-party security tools throughout the development process to safeguard the app.

Essential development tools

Angular offers multiple built-in features and a structured environment for creating an application’s fully functional front-end. However, developers can still choose to use third-party tools or UI component libraries to accelerate the development, ensure consistent design across the app, or add features not available in Angular out of the box. Popular examples of such tools include Angular Material for aligning the app with Google’s Material Design guidelines, NgRx for state management, and PrimeNG for a wide variety of UI components.

React, in turn, provides features only for creating the visual layer of the app interface, so teams need to use additional frameworks and libraries to handle other aspects of app development. For example, React can be combined with React Router for routing, Redux for state management, and React Query for efficient API interaction and data fetching. Next.js extends the capabilities of React even further, providing a seamless connection between frontend and backend services and enabling server-side rendering for better performance and search engine visibility of React apps.

Community support

Both Angular and React have strong communities of active supporters, though the nature and scope of the support differs due to the origins and principles of the two technologies.

Though smaller, Angular’s community is better organized and more enterprise-focused, with its activities closely aligned with Google’s official development roadmap. Coupled with regular updates from Google, this joint effort between Angular’s creators and its community results in official style guides, documentation, and tooling that ensures consistent development practices and long-term support for Angular applications.

React is supported by a massive decentralized community of open-source contributors who help develop libraries, tools, and learning resources. Due to Meta’s active maintenance and frequent updates, React boasts a vast ecosystem of third-party solutions and design patterns developed by a wide range of industry professionals, which makes it highly flexible and adaptable to diverse project needs and developer preferences.

Mobile development options

Angular, while not having an official mobile framework, can be used for mobile development through integrations with third-party solutions like Ionic. However, it hasn’t been widely adopted for mobile app development, primarily because of its reliance on web technologies for rendering and resulting limitations in app performance.

React offers a dedicated framework, React Native, that allows creating cross-platform mobile applications for iOS and Android using a single JavaScript codebase. Since React Native uses native UI components, applications built with it demonstrate near-native performance, which has contributed to the widespread adoption of this technology.