Reactjs & Angular Performance

Harsh Shah
11 min readDec 14, 2021

While Reactjs has quite a good reputation over boosting performance, Angular isn’t lagging anywhere in the competition. Angular has covered everything that optimizes the coding practices and leads to an established level of programming that continually enhances performance. It may be an important thing developers might want to consider while evaluating the Angular vs React performance.

For example, optimizing the digest cycle for your proposed code structure. While you develop codebase for further modules, monitoring and optimizing the loop can verify the changes that are previously assessed.

Also, for the projects that don’t need the facilitation of two-way data binding can be served with older versions of Angular to reduce complexities at a noticeable extent.

Angular offers $cacheFactory that works better for memorization which can eventually be used for recalculating the data, which are being calculated later.

Here’s the example of a popular payment gateway using Angular:

PayPal is a world-famous payment gateway handling over 300 million customers and used by over 200 nations are using Angular proving to be the safest transactions platform in the world.

Reusing the react components is common among the designers since it does not just double the productivity but also optimizes the coding practices. Reactjs is known for its flexibility reusing the components, for instance, starting from the finest components like checkbox, button followed by moving the wrapper components, and reaching the root components.

Practicing such habits ultimately leads to the consistency app performance and facilitates code quality and maintenance no matter at what level project complexity exists.

Testing in Angular & React

Testing in dynamically typed language like Javascript makes it difficult to achieve 100% testing goals. That is the reason why code written in Javascript has to come up with a strong set of tests. Angular has multiple features such as isolation of the unit of code and is written with all the concerns regarding testability in mind.

For instance, the in-built feature of Angular, i.e., dependency injection, makes it easy to pass in dependencies of components and also can mock the components.

While writing tests, mocking the parts that are not already existing in the testing environments is preferable. Tests can spy on the other parts of the function and predict their interactions with them. It is the mocking of data or functional, and it is quite useful to avoid flakiness in data fetching. Tests are very much predictable in Reactjs due to the availability of mocking functions.

Reactjs executes test suites continuously to run the test cases as a part of the development process. It also offers the test runners like Mocha, Ava, and Jest that are capable of running tests while already running the development process.

Since Jest is widely compatible with different features such as mocked modules, timers, and Jsdm support. While libraries such as Mocha are compatible with the browser-specific requirements and support the simulations such as a real browser.

For Code Quality : Angular or React?

We, at Simform, have used some specific tools like AngularCLI to improve on our quality of code to bring standard in whatever we develop with Angular. Since we are used to AngularCLI, it has got us amazing integrations across the projects that we delivered. Integrations like Angular Core, Angular material, etc. have made our project deliveries easy and maintained the code quality we had been expecting for.

AngularCLI has reduced the learning curve of Angular and also allowing developers to predict compilation behavior. Due to which it is possible to generate smooth builds and reduce the iterating efforts of developers, which leads to bad code quality in the end.

Angular expert “Kevin Kreuzer” stated on Twitter:

Opinionated but true: Angular is THE BEST solution for building medium to large applications in enterprise environment with multiple projects and teams.

Reactjs has got a lot many things that not just increase its code quality but give an identity that is different from all other web frameworks. For instance, using Display Name string to debug the messages will let you distinguish the components. We also use prop-types to check in the run time whether the prop type is used for the objects.

Maintaining a code quality in Reactjs is easy because of the code review practices it allows by providing Linters. It helps in generating identical coding practices among the developers in an organization. Since Linters follow a strict set of rules that keep the codebase consistent

Maintainability of Code: Angular vs React

Angular is most most known for building single-page applications. The reason is, single-page applications are having complex structures and several programming modules. Due to which, it often happens to put program files in different files.

Maintaining such complex structure and still keeping it a rich application leads to choosing the best framework that allows complex maintainability and has the capability to manage complex naming conventions. We follow the best practices given by Angular style guide in most cases where SPAs demand a full-proof standard practice of managing a code.

For instance, Weather.com is one of the most prominent examples of using Angular as its backbone technology.

Similarweb indicates weather.com as one of the highest visited websites in the world. Angular allowed them to receive quick weather updates data for the widgets. It integrates widgets with UI components and reuses the components for better maintainability of code.

We’ve often seen developers dealing with serious maintainability problems when it comes to building rich web clients, where combining HTML and Javascript is difficult due to less modularization.

The best part is, Angular resolves these problems by building maintainable javascript. It provides HTML extension to deal with such problems, and it turns out as relief for developers and quite a lot of saving developers’ time.

Convinced with Angular? Let’s build a full-fledged Angular App Together

Tech-consultants often enquire about how best they can maintain the code and practice a habit to write clean code from scratch. But it seems difficult to write clean code without slowing down the production. Reactjs proved to be a better means of writing clean code with the same time investment and quality production hours.

It has shown the developers not to rewrite the same thing again and getting confused between the code review comments. Instead, Reactjs has made developers develop a code that works among the small modules without becoming redundant in practice.

Reactjs doesn’t let developers write code in splits and makes it super usable by computer but also makes it intelligible for other developers. It facilitates reusability of code by allowing the means to create reusable UI components.

Since Reactjs allows creating custom Reactjs components, it is easy to render the uncontrolled input fields and recognize the components easily with the unique naming conventions.

Server Rendering in Angular vs React

Angular facilitates the web crawlers by generating static versions of the application that are likable and searchable easily. With the use of server-side rendering, Angular renders the application by creating a static view before it gets fully interactive. It is up to you how cleverly you use the combination of JSON and client-side caching to increase server-side performance. Nothing beats Angular when it comes to reducing the traffic between client and server.

Angular is designed in a pattern that has in-built testing requirements such as dependency injection and mocking the objects. Since Angular has got Google as a backup, we can not doubt its upcoming improvements. And it is capable of reducing the amount of code by eliminating the need to recompiling and quickly reflecting the changes in the frontend.

To make your application SEO strong, you would need to render the application to the server. Reactjs does it with ease with the help of some specific functions. You can do it by calling RenderToString function instead of calling Render. Unlike other javascript frameworks, Reactjs is not that rigid library that would go on restricting you from getting benefits.

Alternatively, you can also use renderToStaticMarkup if you want to avoid creating DOM attributes such as data-react-id, which is useful for creating a simple static page generator.

The most prominent example of Reactjs application is “Facebook.”

  • Super high-speed rendering
  • Better functions even at the mediocre internet connection

Let’s look at the another example of “Dropbox”

  • Renowned for online file hosting platform
  • Smooth and rapid synchronization of data in the cloud
  • Remote connectivity

Two-way Data Binding Availability

Angular uses two-way data binding and hence so there’s no question that any tech stack can beat the synchronization between two different elements like Angular does. It keeps the two layers updated with the same data. That is to update the model layer as the value changes in the input.

It binds the HTML element to the model variable and not just displays it but also changes it in the backend. It helps in coordinating the two different data models of a framework, which helps in creating an interactive user interface without interventions of several callbacks and extra efforts by the programmer.

Two data binding is the most efficient technique for fetching the data from large ERP based software like medical software, accounting, and other software that demands a highly complex requirement. The bidirectional nature of Angular makes it easy to build enterprise resource planning software.

Reactjs being a library framework, does not follow the automatic approach to data binding and stick to its simplest but solid architecture. It does not let developers fall into the nitty-gritty of the complex handling of objects. However, Reactjs uses one-way data binding with the two way data binding helpers to manage both heavy parsing work and extensive manipulation of data.

Convinced with React? Let’s build a full-fledged React App Together

Optimizing the Bundle-file — Angular vs React

while working with Angular, I found handling single page applications quite easy. Though they are a bit tricky when it comes to the bundle file size.

Most of the websites that are unable to load at the first click aren’t going to have a reasonable click-through rate; neither are promising to search engine traffic. The file that must be downloaded at the initial page is a bundle file, and hence it is crucial to optimize it as much as possible.

Angular uses a compiler to add the understanding between a browser and the code written in the bundle file. It speeds up the compiling process of a browser and makes it better to understand it. However, the increased size of the bundle due to the HTML code written in components can be taken into consideration for improving the performance. For that purpose, Ahead-of-Time (AOT) is used as a part of the workflow.

However, it isn’t the default option from the Angular, but can always be activated through the CLI by switching to the production mode.

Bundle file size matters for building a large scale application to running smoothly. I learned from my user’s experience that analyzing the bundle file size is the most important thing when you want to optimize the application codebase. When you overlook the bundle size with a tech stack like React, you are missing out on an existing opportunity. The applications made with Reactjs often hints about components.

At the end, it becomes a huge production file that earlier began with few components. It is vital to constantly gauge the size of the file since the addition of new features, and dependencies occur over the new business requirements.

Reactjs and Angular Learning Curve

Angular is vast and dynamic. Developers may find it challenging to cover a lot of topics in Angular at first, but it is worth it to give time at the initial phase to better enjoy developing the applications. It starts from primary elements such as directives, modules, components, services, dependency injections, and more. The learning curve for Angular is comparatively higher than the Reactjs at the initial phase.

I suggest you pick any of the tech stack based on the requirement of your upcoming projects. Angular is winning the grounds when it comes to solving the toughest of the problems in large scale applications.

The most basic and primary things to learn in Reactjs are writing components, managing internal states, and how to use props for configuration. Developers may find it weird to write at the initial stages but since it doesn’t add any complexity, it’s a favorable tech stack.

Reactjs won’t ask developers to learn and fall into the complexities of learning logical structures (that maybe the reason behind increasing Reactjs demand in developers), but learning the basics along with state management and routing library; you are on the right edge to start building the apps.

It is evident that both these technologies have so much to offer in terms of features, a suite of tools, and performance, and that makes it even more confusing for development teams to choose one over the other. To make it easy, we’ve listed a couple of questions here that are frequently asked and should help you make the right choice.

Is Angular better than React?

Angular is better than React if your application is enterprise-grade and you need to incorporate complex functionalities like progressive, single-page, and native web apps. However, React specializes in creating UI components and can be used in any application, including single-page apps.

In terms of rendering of pages, Angular uses real DOM implementation but has a unique mechanism of change detection combined with zones that makes web apps faster, while React has virtual DOM implementation, which makes refreshing data faster in web pages. Both frameworks have distinct abilities to build high-performing web apps.

How is Angular different than React?

Angular is a structural, full-fledged framework for building mobile and desktop web apps, while React is a javascript library for creating interactive and complex user interfaces. Angular has a steeper learning curve, so it takes more time initially, while React has a shorter learning curve due to its simple structure and small package size.

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Harsh Shah

To work as a web developer for an organization where I can participate as a React JS , C language and Java based developer for multiple projects.