Angular 2/4 Is Too Little Too Late
Here&#x27;s a litmus test for if you should use Angular or React: how do you feel about the fact that React has ~4 major routing libraries?<p>I&#x27;ve written a book on both Angular 2+ and a book on React. I&#x27;ve talked w&#x2F; hundreds of developers on both sides and I can tell you that people with different constraints (and backgrounds) will have a different response.<p>The author of this article cites &quot;more ReactJS libraries on npm&quot; to imply that React is the better choice. Some people love a la carte infrastructure and the power that comes from choosing each element in your stack.<p>Some people love to have those decisions made for them, because they just want to build their app.<p>It&#x27;s often cited that React is &quot;simpler&quot; than Angular, and if you look at just the core that&#x27;s true. But by the time you pick a data architecture, styling choice, router, etc. you&#x27;re back at the same level of complexity.<p>Actually in React, you&#x27;ve spent a lot of time researching which components you want (and if they&#x27;ll even fit together). The pro here is that you get just the stack you want! The competitive evolution of these libraries means that you _can_ have 4 routers and pick the best. But also, if you&#x27;d just picked Angular, you just use their router and move on.<p>Here&#x27;s another litmus test: Do you want &#x27;string&#x27; templates or JSX? (Now, I know it&#x27;s technically possible to do either in both frameworks, but it&#x27;s almost never done in practice.)<p>Almost everything that seems &quot;more complex&quot; in Angular is a result of string-based templates. DI, AOT, the *ngIf and `let` syntax, is all because you&#x27;re doing templates in strings instead of code. How do you feel about that? Would you rather write templates in JavaScript&#x2F;JSX? Then use React. Do you have designers doing HTML on your team? Then use Angular.<p>(Also the other opens by citing webpack, npm, and third-party libraries as a React-specific benefit, but that makes no sense because angular-cli uses Webpack, it&#x27;s on npm, etc.)