StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Business Tools
  3. UI Components
  4. Javascript UI Libraries
  5. Angular 2 vs React

Angular 2 vs React

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

React
React
Stacks182.6K
Followers147.0K
Votes4.1K
GitHub Stars240.3K
Forks49.7K
Angular
Angular
Stacks3.8K
Followers4.8K
Votes499
GitHub Stars99.2K
Forks26.7K

Angular 2 vs React: What are the differences?

Angular 2 is a comprehensive JavaScript framework for building large-scale web applications, while React is a lightweight JavaScript library focused on building reusable UI components. Here are the key differences between Angular 2 and React:

  1. Architecture and Design Philosophy: Angular 2 is a full-fledged framework that follows the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture. It provides a structured and opinionated approach to web development with built-in features like dependency injection, data binding, and routing. React, on the other hand, is a JavaScript library focused on building user interfaces. It follows a component-based architecture and promotes a more flexible and modular design approach, allowing developers to make decisions about the architecture and libraries they want to use.

  2. Learning Curve and Complexity: Angular 2 has a steeper learning curve compared to React. It has a large and comprehensive documentation, and developers need to understand various concepts such as modules and decorators. React, on the other hand, has a simpler and more intuitive API, making it easier to get started. React's core concepts, such as components and virtual DOM, are relatively straightforward, and developers can gradually learn additional libraries and patterns as needed.

  3. Language and Tooling: Angular 2 is primarily written in TypeScript, a statically typed superset of JavaScript, which brings additional features like strong typing and compile-time error checking. React, on the other hand, can be used with JavaScript as well as TypeScript. Angular 2 comes with a comprehensive CLI (Command Line Interface) that offers a range of development tools and utilities. React, being a library rather than a full framework, allows developers to choose their preferred tools and build setups.

  4. Component Reusability: Angular 2 and React both support component-based development, but with different approaches. Angular 2 encourages the use of a hierarchical component tree, where components have a predefined structure and communicate with each other through input and output bindings. React, on the other hand, creates reusable components by composing smaller components together using props. React's unidirectional data flow and virtual DOM diffing enhance rendering efficiency and component reusability.

  5. Community and Ecosystem: React has a large and active community. It has a rich ecosystem of libraries and tools built around it, providing solutions for various use cases. Angular 2 also has a strong community, but it may not be as extensive as React's. Angular 2 has its own set of libraries and tools, but it may have a narrower scope compared to React's ecosystem.

In summary, Angular 2 is a powerful and feature-rich JavaScript framework offering extensive tools and functionalities for building complex web applications. React, on the other hand, is a lightweight JavaScript library, known for its efficient rendering and component-based approach, making it ideal for building dynamic user interfaces.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on React, Angular

Cyrus
Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs adviceonVue.jsVue.jsReactReact

I find using Vue.js to be easier (more concise / less boilerplate) and more intuitive than writing React. However, there are a lot more readily available React components that I can just plug into my projects. I'm debating whether to use Vue.js or React for an upcoming project that I'm going to use to help teach a friend how to build an interactive frontend. Which would you recommend I use?

884k views884k
Comments
Simon
Simon

Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH

Apr 22, 2020

DecidedonVuetifyVuetifyVue.jsVue.jsNuxt.jsNuxt.js

Our whole Vue.js frontend stack (incl. SSR) consists of the following tools:

  • @{Nuxt.js}|tool:7304| consisting of @{Vue CLI}|tool:9559|, @{Vue Router}|tool:6932|, @{vuex}|tool:6705|, @{Webpack}|tool:1682| and @{Sass}|tool:1171| (Bundler for @{HTML5}|tool:2538|, @{CSS 3}|tool:6727|), @{Babel}|tool:2739| (Transpiler for @{JavaScript}|tool:1209|),
  • Vue Styleguidist as our style guide and pool of developed @{Vue.js}|tool:3837| components
  • @{Vuetify}|tool:6163| as Material Component Framework (for fast app development)
  • @{TypeScript}|tool:1612| as programming language
  • @{Apollo}|tool:5508| / @{GraphQL}|tool:3820| (incl. @{GraphiQL}|tool:7879|) for data access layer (https://apollo.vuejs.org/)
  • @{ESLint}|tool:3337|, @{TSLint}|tool:5561| and @{Prettier}|tool:7035| for coding style and code analyzes
  • @{Jest}|tool:830| as testing framework
  • @{Google Fonts}|tool:2652| and @{Font Awesome}|tool:3244| for typography and icon toolkit
  • @{NativeScript-Vue}|tool:9623| for mobile development

The main reason we have chosen Vue.js over React and AngularJS is related to the following artifacts:

  • Empowered HTML. Vue.js has many similar approaches with Angular. This helps to optimize HTML blocks handling with the use of different components.
  • Detailed documentation. Vue.js has very good documentation which can fasten learning curve for developers.
  • Adaptability. It provides a rapid switching period from other frameworks. It has similarities with Angular and React in terms of design and architecture.
  • Awesome integration. Vue.js can be used for both building single-page applications and more difficult web interfaces of apps. Smaller interactive parts can be easily integrated into the existing infrastructure with no negative effect on the entire system.
  • Large scaling. Vue.js can help to develop pretty large reusable templates.
  • Tiny size. Vue.js weights around 20KB keeping its speed and flexibility. It allows reaching much better performance in comparison to other frameworks.
5.13M views5.13M
Comments
Cyrus
Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs advice

Simple datepickers are cumbersome. For such a simple data input, I feel like it takes far too much effort. Ideally, the native input[type="date"] would just work like it does on FF and Chrome, but Safari and Edge don't handle it properly. So I'm left either having a diverging experience based on the browser or I need to choose a library to implement a datepicker since users aren't good at inputing formatted strings.

For React alone there are tons of examples to use https://reactjsexample.com/tag/date/. And then of course there's the bootstrap datepicker (https://bootstrap-datepicker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), jQueryUI calendar picker, https://github.com/flatpickr/flatpickr, and many more.

How do you recommend going about handling date and time inputs? And then there's always moment.js, but I've observed some users getting stuck when presented with a blank text field. I'm curious to hear what's worked well for people...

401k views401k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

React
React
Angular
Angular

Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.

It is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework. It is a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications.

Declarative; Component-based; Learn once, write anywhere
Progressive Web Apps; Native; Code Generation; Code Splitting
Statistics
GitHub Stars
240.3K
GitHub Stars
99.2K
GitHub Forks
49.7K
GitHub Forks
26.7K
Stacks
182.6K
Stacks
3.8K
Followers
147.0K
Followers
4.8K
Votes
4.1K
Votes
499
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 837
    Components
  • 674
    Virtual dom
  • 579
    Performance
  • 509
    Simplicity
  • 442
    Composable
Cons
  • 41
    Requires discipline to keep architecture organized
  • 30
    No predefined way to structure your app
  • 29
    Need to be familiar with lots of third party packages
  • 13
    JSX
  • 10
    Not enterprise friendly
Pros
  • 109
    It's a powerful framework
  • 53
    Straight-forward architecture
  • 48
    TypeScript
  • 45
    Great UI and Business Logic separation
  • 40
    Powerful, maintainable, fast
Cons
  • 9
    Overcomplicated
  • 9
    Large overhead in file size and initialization time
  • 2
    CLI not open to other test and linting tools
  • 2
    Ugly code
Integrations
No integrations available
Bugsnag
Bugsnag
Firebase
Firebase
Sentry
Sentry
Socket.IO
Socket.IO

What are some alternatives to React, Angular?

jQuery

jQuery

jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.

AngularJS

AngularJS

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

Vue.js

Vue.js

It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.

jQuery UI

jQuery UI

Whether you're building highly interactive web applications or you just need to add a date picker to a form control, jQuery UI is the perfect choice.

Ember.js

Ember.js

A JavaScript framework that does all of the heavy lifting that you'd normally have to do by hand. There are tasks that are common to every web app; It does those things for you, so you can focus on building killer features and UI.

Backbone.js

Backbone.js

Backbone supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing models key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful JSON interface.

Svelte

Svelte

If you've ever built a JavaScript application, the chances are you've encountered – or at least heard of – frameworks like React, Angular, Vue and Ractive. Like Svelte, these tools all share a goal of making it easy to build slick interactive user interfaces. Rather than interpreting your application code at run time, your app is converted into ideal JavaScript at build time. That means you don't pay the performance cost of the framework's abstractions, or incur a penalty when your app first loads.

Aurelia

Aurelia

Aurelia is a next generation JavaScript client framework that leverages simple conventions to empower your creativity.

Flux

Flux

Flux is the application architecture that Facebook uses for building client-side web applications. It complements React's composable view components by utilizing a unidirectional data flow. It's more of a pattern rather than a formal framework, and you can start using Flux immediately without a lot of new code.

Famo.us

Famo.us

Famo.us is a free and open source JavaScript platform for building mobile apps and desktop experiences. What makes Famo.us unique is its JavaScript rendering engine and 3D physics engine that gives developers the power and tools to build native quality apps and animations using pure JavaScript.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase