Stack choices: React vs Vue vs Angular vs Svelte

As a developer, there are many choices to make when building your next application. The rise of serverless technologies allows developers to build and run applications without thinking about servers and this also allows front-end developers to create full-stack applications and build SAAS web apps.

by Jake Prins

In Stack Choices, we take a closer look at some technologies that can help us to build these types of applications and try to make a good decision on what to use. In the last episode, I took a look at JavaScript vs TypeScript. This time, let’s take a look at the JavaScript frameworks.

Angular

This JavaScript framework, developed by Google, has been around for a while and it’s not really the cool kid on the block inside the frontend community. The move from angular 1 (AngularJS) to Angular 2, which was so different it required complete rewrites, seems to left some scars, but times have changed and lots of progress has been made.

Updating your application to the next major version of Angular has never been easier. Since Angular 8, you can just use ng update it to update your application and its dependencies. Besides that, with the new Angular CLI, you can generate components, routes, services, and pipes with a simple command. Besides that, Angular is very stable and has support for great technologies like Typescript and Web Workers, etc. Also, the new Ivy renderer is officially released in Angular 9, which decreased payload size and has a lot of other interesting benefits.

My opinion

After first working with React for quite some time I joined a team that worked with Angular. I have now worked with them for over a year and although I was a bit skeptical at the beginning, I started to like Angular more and more. Some people complain about the file size or that the framework is too bloated, but I think it’s nice to have a framework that has lots of features built-in. It’s not as easy to pick up as Vue or React, and I also wouldn't choose it for smaller side-projects, but for production applications, especially those that you need to work on with multiple people, Angular is a very nice framework.

React