Overview

Ionic

Stacks9.6K

Followers8.6K

Votes1.8K

AngularJS

Stacks61.8K

Followers44.5K

Votes5.3K

GitHub Stars59.0K

Forks27.3K

AngularJS vs Ionic: What are the differences?

AngularJS and Ionic are two popular frameworks used for web development. Let's explore the key differences between them.

Architecture: AngularJS is a JavaScript-based structural framework designed for developing dynamic web applications. It provides a complete solution for building single-page applications (SPAs) and follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern. On the other hand, Ionic is a front-end UI framework built on top of AngularJS. It focuses on creating cross-platform mobile applications using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Ionic follows a component-based architecture and incorporates AngularJS for its functionality.
Mobile Support: While both AngularJS and Ionic allow for the creation of mobile applications, Ionic specifically targets mobile development. Ionic provides a set of pre-built UI components and mobile-optimized behaviors that make it easier to create mobile applications with a native-like experience. These components are designed to be platform-agnostic, allowing developers to build apps that work on both iOS and Android devices.
UI/UX Design: AngularJS primarily focuses on providing a framework for building dynamic web applications and doesn't include extensive UI components out-of-the-box. On the other hand, Ionic places a strong emphasis on UI/UX design and provides a vast library of pre-built components, themes, and styling options. This makes it easier for developers to create visually appealing and interactive mobile applications without spending excessive time on designing and styling.
Integration with Native Features: Ionic offers seamless integration with native device features and APIs using Apache Cordova and Capacitor plugins. Developers can access device functionalities like GPS, camera, contacts, and more using these plugins, allowing them to build feature-rich applications. AngularJS, being primarily a web development framework, doesn't provide such native device integration capabilities by default.
Development Workflow: When using AngularJS, developers typically use a combination of AngularJS CLI, IDEs, and code editors for development. Ionic, on the other hand, provides an additional layer of tools like the Ionic CLI and the use of Capacitor or Cordova for configuring and building the app. This adds some additional steps and configuration to the development workflow when using Ionic.
Performance and Optimization: AngularJS applications can be optimized for performance by implementing techniques like lazy loading, tree shaking, and AoT (Ahead-of-Time) compilation. Ionic, being a framework built on top of AngularJS, inherits these performance optimization techniques. However, Ionic also has specific optimizations for mobile devices like hardware accelerated animations and touch-optimized gestures, which further enhance the overall performance and user experience of mobile applications.

In summary, AngularJS is a JavaScript-based structural framework primarily used for web development, while Ionic is a UI framework built on top of AngularJS specifically designed for developing cross-platform mobile applications with a native-like experience, extensive UI components and mobile-optimized behaviors.

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Advice on Ionic, AngularJS

Simon

Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH

Apr 22, 2020

Decidedon

Vuetify

Vue.js

Nuxt.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

John Clifford

Software Engineer at CircleYY

Jun 8, 2020

Decided

I used React not just because it is more popular than Angular. But the declarative and composition it gives out of the box is fascinating and React.js is just a very small UI library and you can build anything on top of it.

Composing components is the strongest asset of React for me as it can breakdown your application into smaller pieces which makes it easy to reuse and scale.

455k views455k

Comments

Anonymous

CEO at ME!

Jun 7, 2020

Decided

While with Ionic it is possible to make mobile applications with only web technologies, Flutter is more performant and is easy to use if you are willing to learn Dart, which is a fun language. Plus, it has awesome documentation and, while its ecosystem isn't near as big as JavaScript's is, it has a good package manager called Pub and its packages are generally high quality.

403k views403k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Ionic	AngularJS
Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript.	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.
Performance obsessed;Utilizes Angular and React;Native focused;Beautifully designed;Based on Web Components;	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 59.0K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 27.3K
Stacks 9.6K	Stacks 61.8K
Followers 8.6K	Followers 44.5K
Votes 1.8K	Votes 5.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros 248 Allows for rapid prototyping 228 Hybrid mobile 208 It's angularjs 186 Free 179 It's javascript, html, and css Cons 20 Not suitable for high performance or UI intensive apps 15 Not meant for game development 2 Not a native app	Pros 889 Quick to develop 589 Great mvc 573 Powerful 520 Restful 505 Backed by google Cons 12 Complex 3 Dependency injection 3 Event Listener Overload 2 Hard to learn 2 Learning Curve
Integrations
No integrations available	JavaScript

What are some alternatives to Ionic, AngularJS?

jQuery

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

React

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.

Vue.js

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

Flutter

Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.

React Native

React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.

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.

Xamarin

Xamarin’s Mono-based products enable .NET developers to use their existing code, libraries and tools (including Visual Studio*), as well as skills in .NET and the C# programming language, to create mobile applications for the industry’s most widely-used mobile devices, including Android-based smartphones and tablets, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

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 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.

NativeScript

NativeScript enables developers to build native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Universal while sharing the application code across the platforms. When building the application UI, developers use our libraries, which abstract the differences between the native platforms.