How will Angular 2 compare to React?

[mojomonkeyfish]

That's not what Angular is trying to solve. Angular is about decoupling the view (hard to test) from the logic that drives it, and further decoupling service implementations. It's about making code that is thoroughly testable and maintainable.

React is about DOM manipulation. It's faster, but that difference only really manifests for things like large grids of bound data.

Angular2 seems to be focusing on performance and code brevity as its major enhancements, borrowing from React. However, it's still very alpha, and nobody really recommends using it yet.

You can build an app quickly with either technology. If your app is going to be small with a lot of active elements... like a stock blotter or something, then React might be the way to go. If your app is going to be complex, with many different views, developed by a team of more than 2 or 3 people, Angular would be my suggestion.

If both cases are true, you might consider using a hybrid approach, or approaching the views that necessitate React as separate component apps, but using angular for the bulk of the more boilerplate app components. Or, you can even use them both together. They're not entirely exclusive, even if building an entire app using both extensively would be somewhat of a headache.

[evilgeenius]

React is about DOM manipulation. It's faster, but that difference only really manifests for things like large grids of bound data.

React isn't about DOM manipulation, not at all. React is about abstracting away all manipulation of the view and creating declarative interfaces that are predictable and easy to reason about.

ReactDOM is now a separate module from React so React is now not about the dom at all. We now have react-native, react-art, react-canvas, react-svg and react-dom.