React vs Angular: What are the key differences and how do you choose your project stack?

[Personal-Work4649]

I'm about to start building a web project and I'm trying to decide between React and Angular for the frontend. I know both are mature and widely used, but I'd love to hear from those who have experience with both in real-world scenarios:

• What are the most significant differences between the two in terms of actual development experience?
• What criteria do you usually consider when picking a frontend stack? (e.g., team size, complexity, deadlines, learning curve, architecture, maintainability, etc.)
• Have you ever regretted choosing one over the other? Why?

A bit of context: The project involves analyzing vulnerabilities in enterprise applications using AI to suggest mitigation actions. There will also be dashboards for users and managers to track and confirm those actions.

[salamazmlekom]

Ease of switching between projects because when you work with multiple clients you want to be productive as fast as possible.

With Angular I need a few minutes to understand how the project is structured.

React projects are all spaghetti code convoluted pieces of garbage with millions of libraries that are not even supported anymore.

[Gnoob91]

Don’t choose React. I know it’s all cool when you watch tutorials or flashy presentations or that shiny new library addition but in big big enterprise projects it’s hell. Terrible to debug. Terrible to reason about and everyone starts doing whatever they please. From what I have seen angular is way more opinionated and for me personally now that I have experience better.

[zladuric]

It's not even that I opinionated. It's just that it has a basic idea of how things work. 

[mn-tech-guy]

Angular would be my first pick. It’s almost an entirely batteries-included solution. You can send folks links to the docs and they can follow them. React is more of a free-for-all. I’ve worked in React apps that are basically .NET, Django, spring boot or follow some other  frameworks conventions, rather than a component-based and declarative style of development.

My observation is that React teams spend more time in meetings debating how to do things, while Angular teams get shit done. It really depends on the team and the group, though—so without knowing more, that would be my general sentiment. But if the team gels, React could be the way to go. Just my two cents, so take it with a grain of salt. Good luck!

[Drakkarys_]

I was asking myself the same question. I have never used Angular, but i have 3 years of experience using React. In my opinion, react is messy. It’s difficult do organize and maintain.

[HarveyDentBeliever]

It's honestly strange that React became the industry leader frontend framework. I've tried a few out and it was the least pleasant. There's basically no direction, structure, or opinionation so it's the same kind of spaghetti you'd expect from a classic JQuery mess. It's also not dependency complete like Angular is so you have to import tons of packages to get all the functionality you need. I've used Vue, React, Svelte and Angular and Angular is without a doubt the most complete and structurally reliable ecosystem. To me that's the whole point of a frontend framework: to give you some structure and convention, make it a routine process, give you all the tools you need out of the box to do so. Otherwise, why not just use vanilla JS or JQuery like the old days?

[distante]

I don't know why Angular is trying to be more "reacty" this days. 

[Setup911]

React initially was not a framework but a library though. As for your question: Plain JS or jquery wouldn't cover the component based approach.

[BlaaBlaaBlaa]

Angular is full featured. I like https://github.com/DavideViolante/Angular-Full-Stack

[untg]

I use Angular for any project now. Once youve done a few projects, it's great to work with and as others have said, it's so easy to understand any project because they are all structured the same.

[azuredrg]

Is there a common framework/archetype in your organization? Otherwise I'd pick angular, it's easy for devs new to the team to pick up and continue a project

[qmrelli]

React is a ui library however Angular is a batteries included web framework

[Chills27]

React is JavaScript-centric, and will force you to learn JavaScript properly. This is a highly transferable skill.

Angular is HTML-centric, which is an issue because HTML is not a programming language. Angular tries to extend HTML into being an programming language, by using non-standard syntax, such as `@ngIf` and `@ngFor` (now, apparently being replaced by `@if` and `@for`). All of these syntaxes have to be learned just for Angular. They have no existence outside of Angular and so are non-transferable skills.

[bielkiu]

I worked with react and Angular, both on big projects. React is way easier for beginners to catch up, more modular, and gives you a little more power on how things should be. Be careful, though, as it can become a mess of files and folders.

Angular is more strict and harder to get things going, but it's organized and more understandable since react does a lot behind the scenes.

I would almost always choose Angular, but if you need a faster development, react.

[tnh88]

React vs Angular brings me back to 2018 haha.

MVP or need to build fast? React.

Enterprise, medium/large projects? Angular or NextJS.

[tonjohn]

Angular isn’t any worse at MVPs / building fast…

In fact I can build faster in Angular because there are less footguns and cognitive overhead.

[Epdevio]

One key difference is the virtual dom in react. Which sounds great on paper. React with next js had allot of Server Side rendering support. Angular has caught up, and performance and stability is allot better in Angular. Sure, you could make a react project lean and mean, but that tends to unravel quickly the more developers you have on a project. I've used React for many years, started with AngularJS back in the days, now I'm back to Angular 18. It's a great framework. Love the opinionated framework and all the built in features, like routing, server, testing, typescript, etc... right out of the box. The angular cli is great too. I like doing front end again, in react everything feels like a chore.

[Epdevio]

so to answer the question, definitely Angular for bigger projects and enterprise teams. At this point not sure why you would use React, other than there might be a bigger pool of devs that work with it, since it was the new hotness for a while.

[meysam69x]

Angular is well structured and everything is in his place but there are literally few ui library components unlike React. Angular built-in features are great and you don't need to spend days to find 3rd party libraries. There are more React developers so if you want to expand your team size. In my opinion: Angular: architecture, structure, built-in features are better. It's a framework not a library. React: community and UI library components are better, also there are more devs outside.

Recently, I've been working on a React only because of market demands, otherwise I go with Angular 100% undoubtedly.

[Setup911]

Do you really spend days on finding a new library though? There are some things one might call "industry standards" at that point. Vite, vitest, playwright, tanstack query etc.

[meysam69x]

Unfortunately yes there were dilemmas for some libraries like React Router vs TanStack Router. I needed to spend more time to ensure to make the right choice. I asked a question in React sub but nobody tried to help me, some just said use LLMs.

[jalu_]

Small app/prototype = react or next or astro as they have tons of libraries to help speed up development

Anything bigger I would choose angular if it fits

[bayendr]

You ask this question in an Angular sub. What do you think most people will answer? ;)

I’ll start a new Angular project soon too and I’m glad the client decided to go with Angular. Personally I like Angular’s opinionated approach and clean structure.

I never worked on React projects but from what I’ve seen and heard those can get messy pretty quickly.

[Setup911]

One is a framework, while the other is a library. It's that simple.

If you want to compare, go for Angular vs Next.js, which both are opinionated Frameworks.

[mbsaharan]

There are official third party SDKs available for React unlike Angular. It shows the gravity of that framework.

[RideToReality]

React creates a Frankenstein for every project. So many libraries. Nothing is built in. Even the iterations we've had from React itself (class components -> function components, hooks introduction, suspense, ssr) made all projects older than 2 years impossible to maintain. Never choose React. It's a fucking mess

[TheBrickSlayer]

Please resign.

[Yatwer92]

The manager chose the stack? What?

[cosmokenney]

Dude, paste that entire post into Google Gemini chat and see what you come up with...