Angular stands as one of the most versatile, feature-packed, and flexible front-end development frameworks in the domain of custom software development. Some of the world’s biggest web platforms, such as Gmail, Forbes, and UpWork, use Angular as a pillar of their user-facing side. However, the world of front-end development is rapidly evolving, as popular frameworks turn into legacy and new technologies are released regularly.

Is Angular still an ultimate front-end development solution? We’ve already provided an in-depth comparison of Angular vs. other top-rated front-end development frameworks. Today we will overview Angular pros and cons, tell you about some of the best Angular development practices, and help you understand the potential of Angular app development services in 2024.

What is Angular?

Let’s start with a general overview of Angular and its history. Angular is a TypeScript-based single-page web application framework released and maintained by Google. It is open-source and free to use. Released in 2016, it is also a successor to AngularJS. However, Angular and AngularJS are completely different by many parameters. The table below illustrates some of the most significant distinctions between the two technologies.

Angular is an open-source component-based software development framework made and maintained by Google for building highly dynamic web app interfaces. Although this framework was introduced on the market in September 2016, it has a notable predecessor – AngularJS. The scheme below illustrates the main differences between the two.

Despite all the differences, the key purpose of Angular remains the same as the one of its predecessor – building dynamic web app interfaces capable of processing large volumes of data. The focus on dynamic interface development has been one of the core advantages of AngularJS and remains one of the most critical Angular benefits. Upgrading an AngularJS to Angular is not an easy walk. To modernize the technology to the modern software development standards, Angular developers based it on TypeScript instead of JavaScript, which was the core programming language behind AngularJS. This means that to modernize your web app from AngularJS to Angular, you need to rewrite the application code completely.

Angular Pros

Now, let’s take a look at the core advantages of Angular, making it an excellent front-end development solution for 2024.

Excellent performance

Angular offers a wide range of features supporting excellent application performance. In particular, its two-way binding means that all changes in data are immediately reflected in views, resulting in more performance-oriented development. In addition, Angular’s ivy renderer provides for very efficient rendering. This feature also translates into better performance of Angular applications.

One of Angular’s biggest selling points is its convenient Command-line interface (CLI). It offers various tools for building configurations for app production deployment and runs various tasks allowing the developers to minimize the size of the final bundle, improving the overall application productivity. Finally, Angular code becomes more efficient with each respective release, which also boosts software performance, making Angular one of the most high-performing front-end development frameworks.

What does it mean from the business perspective?
Angular helps you build high-performing applications that ensure excellent customer satisfaction rates. Angular apps are also reliable and flexible in terms of scalability.

Components-based development

Component-based architecture is one of the most valuable Angular advantages. Each part of the app’s UI and its features form a separate component. These components are self-sufficient and can be customized, changed, and developed separately. As a result, the code becomes more well-structured, while code customization of specific components doesn’t impact the entire app.

Different solution parts can be customized and updated independently. Surely, the APIs and structures of different components may vary and connect to each other in distinctive ways. However, overall, there are no challenges with fixing these components. Also, this feature facilitates code reusability because a single component can be used across different parts of the application many times.

What does it mean from the business perspective?
Component-based software development is synonymous with robust software development and customization. It brings shorter time-to-market and much simpler app customization.

Robust ecosystem

Angular has a large and vibrant community, providing lists of tools, add-ons, plugins, best practices, and professional developer tips. Basically, many reusable Angular components can be found online as libraries, which significantly simplifies the development speed. In addition, if your developers find any problem while developing an Angular app, there, most probably, already are ready-to-go solutions provided by the developer community.

What does it mean from the business perspective?
Support from the Angular development community may be very helpful to your development team. This translates into faster application development and clean code, which can be easily customized. Also, the fact that almost any problem with Angular development can be fixed with community support means greater reliability of Angular front-end development.

Asynchronous programming

With this Angular advantage, many commands can be executed simultaneously. When a user calls any action, the app keeps running and performing other actions. As a result, different developers and development teams can handle different tasks simultaneously, while the application keeps working without freezing.

The core technology behind Angular’s asynchronous programming capabilities is RxJS. This programming library supports handling data asynchronously. Software engineers use it to avoid app freezing and work with data more efficiently.

What does it mean from the business perspective?
Asynchronous programming ensures better user experience with the application. Even while being updated or customized, the app remains fully-available to the users. Besides, asynchronous programming ensures better app performance even in case of particular disruptions.

Single-page application development

Angular is known as a perfect solution for building dynamic single-page apps. These are the applications that don’t need to load new pages to show any information. Instead, they present loads of dynamic data and views on a single page. Angular offers a broad range of tools, configurations, and templates for developing single-page applications capable of processing significant loads of data with excellent efficiency.

What does it mean from a business perspective?
Single-page applications are modern, user-friendly and ensure high user satisfaction. In addition, Angular offers a rich toolset for building high-load single-page applications in the shortest terms possible.

Code reusability

As has been already mentioned, code reusability is a critical advantage of Angular. Various UI elements can be used multiple times with minimum or no customization at all. All these elements are completely independent, which means that their duplication and customization don’t disrupt the overall application performance and functionality.

What does it mean from the business perspective?
Reusable code is all about faster development. This means that you may expect a shorter time to market if your front-end developers are reusing Angular UI elements while working on your application.

Platform-agnostic philosophy

When it comes to cross-platform mobile applications, you can use Angular combined with either NativeScript or Ionic to build dynamic apps for both iOS and Android, allowing companies to use the same codebase across different platforms and build solutions that are close to native.

What does it mean from the business perspective?
Angular’s cross-platform development capabilities mean that you can ensure a much bigger outreach of your platform. A single codebase can be used across various platforms, which means that you cover different desktop and mobile devices in short terms.

Angular Material Design

Material Design is one of Angular’s most notable libraries for building highly customizable and diverse UIs. It offers diverse functionality for building design elements in Android, iOS, and Flutter apps, as well as web platforms. Notably, Material Design combines a strong focus on aesthetics and style with user experience considerations. One of its core purposes is to make the user experience as appealing as possible. Angular Material offers a variety of prebuilt components, such as control buttons, navigation elements, layouts, indicators, tabs, pop-ups, and data tables.

What does it mean from the business perspective?
Angular allows companies to build excellent and up-to-date UI/UX designs in short terms and without overspending. Experienced designers can build the most ingenious and creative designs with pre-built elements. So, your app provides an excellent user experience without costing you a fortune.

Angular Cons

Despite its many benefits, Angular also has some cons that should be considered. Most of these disadvantages can be solved with the right approach. However, to be capable of solving them, you should be prepared.

A lot of boilerplate code

Some developers consider Angular to be a rather verbose framework. All the components are independent and can be managed separately, but their management is not an easy task. Up to five files may be required for a single component in Angular. A developer should inject dependencies and declare the component lifecycle interfaces. With all these things needed, Angular component code may sometimes be too long and complex.

Fortunately, each new Angular release is aimed at solving this problem. While Angular code is still, usually, far from simple, new releases introduce methods for making it more concise and understandable. In addition, this Angular’s feature may significantly pay off in the long run, as this framework allows you to create a directive that will add behaviors to the component, reducing the amount of work and code maintenance tasks in the future. In addition, Angular CLI provides automation, enabling you to cut down your workload on Angular boilerplate code by 70%.

SEO limitations

Angular is known as an excellent solution for building excellent single-page web applications. Such apps are rendered on the client’s side, which prevents web crawlers or search engines, such as Google or Bing, from seeing the full structures and content of relevant web pages. This disrupts the website’s listing in search engine results. As a result, Angular is not a very popular solution among companies that develop websites to promote them with traditional SEO practices.

However, there are certain techniques and packages that allow developers to improve SEO for Angular apps. For example, they can use the Angular universal approach to ensure server-side rendering of Angular applications. This solution eliminates the main factor behind Angular’s SEO limitations.

Steep learning curve

There exists an opinion that Angular is a rather challenging front-end development framework to master. Although many Angular features, such as component-based development, simplify software engineers’ work, boilerplate code and injected dependencies ensure a rather steep learning curve for Angular. In addition, Angular is based on TypeSrcipt instead of JavaScript, which is the most popular language in terms of front-end development. This means that inexperienced developers may need some extra time to understand Angular.

To mitigate this issue, aim to hire experienced Angular developers. Fortunately, the market has a lot to offer in this regard. Besides, community support and additional tools will significantly simplify Angular onboarding for motivated developers.

 

As a result, the complete list of the major Angular pros and cons look as follows.

When to Use Angular

Now that you know the main strengths and weaknesses of Angular, let’s proceed with ideal use cases for this framework.

Dynamic single-page applications

Single-page apps are often much cheaper and faster to develop than multi-page applications. In addition, they offer an excellent user experience with their short response time. The key challenge is making a single-page application truly dynamic. Angular manages to deal with it, as this software development framework has single-page application development as its core purpose. A rich toolset and a diversity of configuration options allow Angular developers to build highly dynamic single-page apps processing big loads of content.

Progressive web apps

Progressive web apps (PWAs) are browser applications that run perfectly on both desktop and mobile. Such solutions are less reliable than cross-platform applications, but they also cost less. Upon recognizing the demand for progressive web apps, Google decided to provide all Angular versions post-2015 with built-in support to create a PWA. Angular offers a variety of configurations and features making it a perfect solution for building progressive web applications.

High-load apps

Flexibility and excellent performance peculiar to Angular make it a perfect solution for building high-load enterprise apps. Angular’s CLI allows developers to minimize the size of component files, which makes it a perfect choice for building high-load apps working with large data volumes. Besides, Angular offers a rich toolset for building dynamic UI/UX designs that easily deal with extreme loads of data while maintaining excellent app performance.

Cross-platform solutions

Angular versatility means that the developers can use it beyond web front-end development. With its rich arsenal of tools, Angular can be used for cross-platform mobile development.

Angular Development Tools

We have already mentioned a rich Angular ecosystem facilitating faster and more efficient development with this framework. Here is the list of Angular tools applied by our team.

Karma

Karma is a testing automation tool that allows our Angular developers to run tests and ensure higher code quality. It performs tests in the browser but displays their results via the Angular CLI, providing consistent feedback on the progress of each test.

WebStorm

It is an integrated development environment widely used by Angular software engineers. WebStorm offers comprehensive code options for Angular developers. In particular, it provides navigation tools and error-detecting features that significantly improve the quality of code and the speed of development.

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a source-code editor that boosts Angular development with a variety of useful features. In particular, it is commonly used for debugging the code, highlighting syntax, creating snippets, code refactoring, and using embedded GIT.

Angular CLI

It is a command-line interface tool that provides a command shell for direct initialization, development, and maintenance of Angular applications. Angular CLI makes development much more convenient and adds necessary automation.

 

Conclusions

As seen from this article, the number of Angular benefits is more significant than the number of Angular cons. Various tools make this framework an excellent option for developing the front end in applications of diverse types. In addition, Angular has many benefits compared to other popular front-end development technologies, such as React and Vue.js.

But to leverage Angular properly, you should rely on the right team with solid Angular development expertise. Leobit knows how to leverage Angular combined with .NET and other top-notch frameworks. Our experienced Angular team, composed of top-class front-end developers from Ukraine, Poland, Estonia, and Austin, TX, has numerous excellent projects involving Angular development in its portfolio.

For example, our team used this framework to develop a sportstech ecosystem. The solution includes a web-based club and instructor resources for creating, scheduling, and overseeing indoor cycling classes. Its social features contribute to the development of a large community of sports enthusiasts. Check out our sportstech case study for more information on this project.

Another notable Angular development project handled by the Leobit team involved the development of a re-commerce reporting application for leading European circular tech services enterprises. The platform provides businesses with tools for tracking and reducing their environmental impact. It is a scalable reporting portal that empowers companies to monitor, assess, and enhance their carbon footprint using intuitive dashboards. These dashboards calculate and oversee the supply chain operations, manufacturing processes, and logistics associated with reused and refurbished devices. You may check out a full case study on our website.

If you want to build a similar or completely different application leveraging Angular, contact us. We will discuss your needs and come up with an ideal cooperation format to deliver a tailored Angular solution.