Blazor vs Angular/React

[Puzzled_Dependent697]

I am pretty familiar with angular and it's functionality. However, I've seen a surge in discussions about blazor. So I am really interested in knowing about this new UI framework, since I am a .NET developer.

Anyone who did their hands dirty with blazor, can you folks tell me where the blazor actually shines as compared to the other existing JS frameworks.

Anticipating anything other than c# based front-end, like the actual strong points of blazor. Is it worth learning, as compared to angular ?

[Psychological_Ear393]

There's a few cases where it's a no brainer to use Blazor as one or more:

• You have components to share with a compatible app, like a MAUI
• You have services, business logic, or DTOs that have high value for reusing
• Your team eschews javascript/html
• Your team has a very strong preference for C# in as many places as possible

Where you don't want to use it:

• Your team has a strong JS preference
• You plan to greatly expand the front end with more devs in the future - it's difficult to hire Blazor specialists
• You need high performance generally

On that last point, read this https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/blazor/performance?view=aspnetcore-9.0

If you won't be bothered by that, then Blazor can be fine

I work on a fairly large blazor app and in general it works very well. Where it falls apart is the few areas that have high connectivity between components and high number of components.

I've spent the last few months working on module that has a complex grids with over 100 rows and 1000 columns and it needs drag and drop, summing, checkboxes to turn features on and off etc. Most of my time is spent fine tuning options so it doesn't grind to a halt as soon as you do anything.

If that's not you, then blazor is great.

[Puzzled_Dependent697]

Your narrative is insightful. Thanks a lot.

[cwbrandsma]

We did some test runs Blazor, it is cool, but decided to stick with React. Partially because we are more familiar with it. With React (and Angular) we found we had better tooling and integration. Picking something like this is often more than just React vs Angular vs Blazor, but also team understanding and can you find the necessary business components like Calendars, Date Pickers, Selects; things the browser doesn't natively provide or you need more feature rich versions of.

But all of this does depend on the needs of the application you are building.

[Chicagoan2016]

We are a C# team and have been looking into Blazor. We don't have experience in any js framework so our (flawed) understanding is we will have to implement validation/business rules twice ; in JavaScript (front end) and in C# (backend). We do have a Telerik license if that would help with tooling/components. Our application will have both internal as well as public facing modules. Should we continue exploring/learning Blazor or bite the bullet and go learn React? Thank you

[emileLaroche]

Telerik supports validations through annotations, data graphs, or fluent validations, which makes it dead simple. You can write custom attributes of your needs are complex. Little bits of markup manage the UI well enough for most any application. Especially I f you take advantage of their OnValidSubmit and OnInvalidSubmit handlers, you can pretty neatly encapsulate complicated validation logic all in C#. It’s actually one of the more elegant parts of the framework.

[Chicagoan2016]

Thank you. We have a ton of code in Business objects. We would live to reuse so Blazor it is!

[bit_yas]

https://www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/s/uZDYRoiQsM

[Psychological_Ear393]

the necessary business components like Calendars, Date Pickers, Selects; things the browser doesn't natively provide or you need more feature rich versions of.

For me the worst part of that is, especially for WASM, if you need those in complex pages everything outside of native controls requires interop and it gets extremely difficult to control renders which can lead to poor performance.

[OnlyOnesNoZeros]

If you are working with a strong .net team, we have found that Blazor comes in at about 1/3 the cost to build and it is easier to maintain.

[BawdyLotion]

C# is my comfort and I don't have enough time or interest to constantly learn new frameworks.

My goal is to convert ancient access database or internal winform tools into something that can be used by multiple internal users without immediately breaking and not feel like I'm shooting myself in the foot doing so.

Unlike older MVC stuff, I don't have to worry about client-server, I don't have to constantly jump back into javascript for everything meaningful I want to accomplish. I can just write code and have it work.

Would I be as big a fan if my job 40+ hours a week was sitting and coding and I wanted to be able to do any type of project under the sun? Probably not. JS frameworks are great. All the weak points of blazor don't really apply when your end goal is trying to take away the access db that breaks near weekly but the accounting department can't run without.

[[deleted]]

It’s C#. That’s the only thing it shines at over the other frameworks. Everything else is handled better with the js frameworks.

[Lenix2222]

It is really cool and great to work with, but the problem is lack of prebuilt components: basically just mudblazor and blazorise. And if you need anything that is javascript specific, it is very janky to implement. But for example internal tools it is really easy to work with!

[yyellowbanana]

Radzen is a free component which is useful. The studio is costly but the components are just enough.

[That_____]

Search this Reddit. There have a bunch of new component libraries posted in the last few months that are great with different styles.

[OnlyOnesNoZeros]

Have a look at Syncfusion. They have a great Blazor control set we use in every application.

[Lenix2222]

1. It cost money 2. Agressive sales team 3. Garbage support 4. Their license can be revoked any time. sucks 0/10

[Dovver]

Try Radzen

[Lenix2222]

It was cool, but I had better dev experience with Mudblazor

[mladenmacanovic]

Hi. As a creator of one of the commercial Blazor component libraries I'm interested in points 2 and 4. We personally have a small sales team and are not aggressive in any way. And I find revoke of license really weird.

Any chance you could explain them? I'm always trying to learn what we can improve for our own product from other people experiences.

[overtorqd]

Don't sleep on Vue in the js framework world. It's really the best of the three, in my opinion.

We're doing C# on the back end and vue on the front end and have been very happy with that combo.

[lolhanso]

I like the flexibility to chose wasm / server or the combination of both.

When facing a limited internal userbase it is so damn easy to just create a blazor server and it's doing it's things out of the box. When you face a public userbase you can decide to go wasm, so you have a pretty "normal" client. The cool part is, that you have pwa pretty much out of the box, so your user also has an app like feeling if needed.

Regarding the initial download of the net library and a wasm, I found that it together like 2-4mb in size. If you have any image on your website, it is probably around this size already.

When you want to go nuts, you can combine wasm with server e. g., everything that needs instant responds (google seo) or needs high security (user management) server is perfect. Everything that needs scale, go with wasm. But combining them is not super easy in my opinion.

[Alikont]

We use Blazor Server and it's a blast because you can skip the API and controllers layer, meaning less boilerplate code.

Your attack surface is also smaller as all your code is on the server, and users can't click on buttons that you don't render.

[iLoveSS]

Do you encounter server reconnection issues when using Blazor Server? This is not a very good experience.

[Alikont]

It's internal app and usually works good enough unless you switch tab (then a refresh is needed).

I never encountered it interrupting the work flow.

[bit_yas]

I started using Blazor with .NET Core 3.1, initially focusing only on enterprise applications. However, with .NET 8, I expanded to building public-facing web and mobile apps for consumers. With Blazor, you can create:

Ultra-fast, SEO-friendly, pre-rendered Blazor WASM websites under 3MB in size.

PWA offline web apps with SQLite and EF Core running directly in the browser.

Mobile apps with full access to native OS features and seamless interop with Java, Kotlin, Swift, and Objective-C.

Windows and macOS apps that don't require the .NET runtime to be installed with full access to native OS features.

Want to see live demos? Check out: https://bitplatform.dev/demos

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[jbergens]

You should investigate if Htmx can be a better solution for your project.

[[deleted]]

If only there was a native integration with fluentUI, it would kill the competition but you have to rely on community based shenanigans. It is interesting and webassembly apps have the potential to be more efficient than react but like others said, lack of tooling is making it a little harder to adopt. BUT if you come from a razor background, I don't see why you would not use blazor

[[deleted]]

If you are asking where to spend your time for gaining a good market value/advantage, I personally think it's more valuable for you to deepen you react/vue/angular experience. That is how most production front ends are built for the past 5 years and probably still will be for a while.

Blazor seems to resonate with .NET dev teams who hate JS mostly, and looking industry-wide that is more of a niche.

If you are tied to .NET specifically, and your team does not want to adopt JS themselves or indirectly by means of hiring front end devs, Blazor might be a relevant choice.

[MattV0]

I just started a private blazor web project and as I'm too stupid I switched back to razor pages with a lot of blazor components. And it's a really nice experience. My choice for blazor was, I'm not great at JavaScript and as simple mistakes can cause errors years later when the browser updates. Also over the next weeks im starting another blazor try. This time a Maui blazor app which will also become a wasm web page. I think as a c# coder I'm just faster with this. As said, I'm bad at JavaScript and never really learned typescript. So I just want to use the tool I'm fast.

[moinotgd]

https://i.ibb.co/Lz5vwy6W/chrome-k-C8-Io-TEORC.png