Top 10 Angular Alternatives to Check out in 2019

Over the last 20 years, frontend development technologies have significantly evolved. It has changed the way developers approach frontend development. Right from basic HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, to a large number of frameworks and libraries, frontend development has much to use in order to add in functionality. Now within a very short amount of time, developers can easily build a complex user interface by using the best of such technologies.

It was from 2010 that JavaScript frameworks started to evolve and the first one which everyone came to know about in the market is AngularJS. Just within a short span of time, it became quite famous in the market. With time Angular brought on the table a number of complications which paved the way for a new version.

Sadly, it was not compatible with the old version and this led to the decreasing popularity of Angular. This led developers to look for alternatives and some of them became a popular solution with time. Some of the top Angular alternatives have been explained below:

React

Nowadays, React is turning out to be one of the most popular frameworks in the market. Slowly some of the developers are making the shift from Angular to React. React was developed by some developers at Facebook and it is used for the development of single page applications. React comes with some of the trendy features like one-way data flow and Virtual DOM. In fact, AngularJS vs ReactJS is the most popular topic among the development community

React is component based and declarative in nature. So while cleanly maintaining code, it lets to develop complex UIs. Comparatively React is smaller in size, and therefore, mostly, there is a need to have additional libraries to carry out the development of complex applications. React is used to work on the View layer of an application.

Vue

Another alternative which you can think for Angular is Vue. This JavaScript framework comes from Evan You and is now an open source option available to the developers. You can build single page applications using this powerful and progressive JavaScript framework. Like React, it works on the View layer of the application, needs the support of additional libraries and comes with Virtual DOM. In short, it comes with concepts which are similar to both React and AngularJS. When we talk about the template style, it is kind of like Angular but as it is lightweight, Vue is more powerful compared to Angular.

Vue is easy to understand and is flexible in nature. It comes with a number of features useful for developers like CSS transitions and animations, Reactive Interfaces, custom filters, and simple codes.

Ember

Ember is another JavaScript framework in the list and is open source in nature. It follows the best practices that come with the framework and build scalable single page applications. Ember follows the MVVM (Model-View-View-Model) pattern.

A number of popular websites in the market like Nordstrom, LinkedIn, Vine and many others makes use of Ember. You can use Ember to build desktop and mobile applications too. If you want to look at this area, one of the successful examples is Apple Music.

Ember comes with friendly API, which is quite easy for the developers to understand and work with. Some of the features that you should know about Ember are Ember templates, Ember CLI and for debugging Ember Inspector tool.

Meteor

If you are planning to use pure JavaScript for developing web and mobile applications, then choosing Meteor as your platform can be a good idea. This open source platform is free and it easily runs both on server and client side. Without using any extra code, it can easily transform the data changes to the client side as it directly integrates with MongoDB. You can easily use Meteor with React, Vue and Angular frameworks. It comes with its own template engine for app design.

Meteor, being a full-stack framework can be considered as the best alternative for Angular. Once you have learned to use this framework, you can easily build everything in an application. It is easy to learn Meteor and you can build faster with it, which makes developers to love it.

Polymer

A polymer is an open source JavaScript library developed by developers at Google and it is used to build web applications. Some of the brands using Polymer are Electronic Arts, Netflix, Google Earth, and YouTube to name a few.

At the basic level, the concept of web components is what a polymer is built on. Polymer comes with a number of features like cross-browser compatibility, building custom HTML elements and Polymer CLI. Today Polymer does have some drawbacks in terms of support and documentation, but as it is developed by Google, chances are more that it will have a bright future in the market.

Backbone

Backbone is a lightweight JavaScript library which is in the market for quite some time now. This is a matured platform and is used to develop single page applications. This library is based on Model-View-Presenter (MVP) architecture, which abstracts DOM into views, data into models and uses events to bind them together.

Backbone provides some features like Syncing with the back-end, RESTful JSON interface, and Event Driven communication. Backbone lets you develop mobile applications and web application in a well-structured and organized format.

Aurelia

If you want to have a modern open source UI framework to develop mobile and web applications, then you should choose the next-gen solution like Aurelia. It makes use of TypeScript or JavaScript in order to design complex apps. When it comes to development, Aurelia follows the latest standards in JavaScript. It comes with a nice API and is clean; it is simple and concise while being flexible and powerful at the same time. Aurelia comes with an extensive collection of libraries which can be used separately for the projects and when combined together, it forms a robust and powerful framework.

Aurelia adopts the reactive and modern based approach. It is quite beneficial for application development and comes with features like two-way data binding, Forward thinking, Testing, Custom HTML elements, etc. You can easily start working with Aurelia and it is quite developer friendly. In short, Aurelia can be considered as an amazing alternative to Angular, for the people who are interested in working on the latest JavaScript applications.

Mithril

When you are thinking about Angular, Mithril can be considered as a better alternative. It can be used to build Single Page Applications and is a modern client-side JavaScript framework to be used. It is fast, small and comes with out-of-the-box XHR and routing utilities. Mithril has been used as a solution by brands like Vimeo, Nike and open source platforms like Liches.

It comes with readymade documentation to take care of common tasks. You can use Mithril to develop mobile and web apps in pure JavaScript. It helps to get done the tasks in the most efficient manner.

Riot

Riot is a component-based UI library which is simple but comes with some amazing features which make it the better choice compared to its contenders in the market. Riot brings together custom tags which build a reusable component that comes from the right combination of JavaScript and HTML. By using these tags, developers get to develop complex views by making use of HTML, which comes with syntax that is readable to humans. Moreover, this library is lightweight, but that does not mean that it compromises any features which a UI library needs. One of the other reasons to go for Riot is that it is very easy to learn and quite easy to be adopted by the developers.

Sencha Ext

Now you can build interactive web applications available for multiple platforms using the application framework of Sencha Ext. You can use Sencha Ext to build single page applications as it is a full framework, you can also use it to create dynamic grids on static pages as you can use it as a minimal component framework. It was in 2007 that it was created as an add-on library and now the newer versions have lesser dependencies on external libraries and so their use is no more compulsory. As per the latest updates you can use it as a supplement and as a single script for building application with Sencha Cmd.

Wrapping It Up

For many developers choosing the framework for development is not the thing that matters, but what they put in can make the building stay strong. Now when we talk about the frameworks, they all come with their set of pros and cons and developers get to choose the one they feel will fit their needs. No doubt with Angular development one can build a number of successful projects, but now we have more alternatives which are growing steadily.