Within the competitive market of choosing the best frontend framework for application development, Bootstrap and Angular have come up to the hot-seat. The fundamentals of both frameworks are different – starting from its architecture, components, development style, testing, code maintainability, and even its learning curve. While on the one hand, Bootstrap is an HTML/CSS/JS framework with ready-made components, Angular is a TypeScript based framework with vast tools and immense codes for app development.
Instead of getting into the competitive debate, you can read through our comprehensive guide outlining the fundamentals of both the frameworks and know their suitability for your next project.
What is Bootstrap? – An Overview
Bootstrap, also known as Twitter Bootstrap, is an open-source front-end CSS framework used to create responsive mobile-first websites. While the front-end framework template is primarily based on CSS, there are various HTML templates available along with support from JavaScript components like jQuery. It has become the second popular UI development framework for its responsive design templates, frameworks, grids, and most importantly, multi-site compatibility.
Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton developed this framework with the idea of standardizing the use of a framework by Twitter employees. This is how the framework came to be known as Twitter Bootstrap. In 2011, the developers launched this project on GitHub for everyone’s access.
Use Cases of Bootstrap
- Microblogging applications
- Social media applications
- Video streaming applications
- E-commerce websites
- Content-based website
- Geo-location applications
- On-demand applications
- Payment applications
- Messaging service web app
- Responsive web applications
Popular Apps Built with Bootstrap
Vogue – The fashion magazine uses Bootstrap for its flat responsive website templates, making the site compatible with all devices. It also uses Bootstrap’s 12 grid layout to fit in various content-based details within a single screen.
Apple Maps Connect – Apple uses MapKit JS for creating its interactive maps for multiple platforms. The Mapkit JS employs Bootstrap to build its user interface designs.
Lyft – The ride-sharing company utilized Bootstrap’s grid features along with the drop-down plugins for their website. The framework also helped in the website’s development within a short span of time.
Paypal – The online payment processing website uses Bootstrap’s Pricing Sliders to create the payment forms while checking out, adding cards, or paying bills through the site.
Whatsapp – The user interface of Web Whatsapp has been created using Bootstrap for better interactive features and facilities over the desktop application.
What is Angular? – An Overview
Angular is a typescript-based Javascript framework that helps businesses build scalable web applications. It is a standalone front-end framework with in-built tools and libraries that don’t hamper the size or application speed. It provides development opportunities across all platforms through its reusable code that can be used for any deployment target. It has a dynamic UI binding at plain object or property level, and a two-way data binding that is integral to its architecture.
Angular was initially released in 2016, which was a complete rewrite of the 2010 AngularJS. The application framework was developed by Misko Hevery and the Angular team at Google. It is the same team that is handling the framework today, along with other external developers.
Use Cases of Angular
- Video streaming applications
- eCommerce applications
- Real-time data application
- User-generated content portals
- Content-based websites
- Progressive web applications
- Native mobile applications
- Single page web applications
- Gaming applications
- Cloud-based applications
Popular Apps Built with Angular
Mixer – The live streaming platform for video games incorporated Angular to create the interface of its video streaming facilities. It also helped the team to update data of single-page applications in real-time.
Gmail – The single-page mailing application uses Angular for its dynamic interface. The site renders data on the front-end, enables access to the cached data offline, and incorporates several SPA advantages.
PayPal – The online payment processing website incorporated Angular to carry out stunning website performance and easily handle spikes in user transactions. Its few-clicks authorization and the checkout page are some of the other features built with the help of Angular.
Forbes – The digital edition of the American magazine uses Angular 5 for its user interface, which has the capability to respond to 74 million monthly users in the US.
Weather.com – The Weather Channel incorporates Angular for its UI that is managed by separate teams for its separate directories. Angular allows the site to integrate multiple maps, real-time broadcasting, and video streaming for news updates.
Bootstrap vs. Angular – Pros and Cons
Before you choose a framework, it’s important that you understand the opportunities and shortcomings it brings along. This comparison between Bootstrap and Angular should help you select the most compatible technology for your application.
Pros of Bootstrap
Responsive design – Provides the necessary features of creating a user interface that is responsive in styles and structures and is compatible with multiple platforms.
Time-saving – Provides excellent documentation on each component, and its readily available resources help omit the process of writing codes and debug the sites quickly. The CSS preprocessor, LESS, can be used to save time on the custom development process.
Styling Components – Provides various user templates, themes, and plugins and a grid system that are free and customizable as per project requirements.
Consistency and Compatibility – Excellent CSS and Javascript compatibility enables excellent cross-browser consistency
Substantial community support – A free and open-source framework available on Github with significant community support contributing to its development.
Cons of Bootstrap
Similar website templates – Usually criticized for having limited templates, making websites and applications made with Bootstrap look the same. Avoiding this similarity might require extensive manual customization which can be time-consuming and beats the purpose of using this framework.
Learning curve – Developers may have to invest some time, though depending on their prior knowledge of frontend technologies, to learn more about the class components and combinations.
Unused Resources from JavaScript Library – The JavaScript of Bootstrap is tied to jQuery, which is an extensive, heavy-to-run library with several unnecessary or unused components. These unused resources make the website bulky, thus making it slower in terms of performance.
Rewriting and Overriding – Significant amount of customization might lead to deviation from the customary Bootstrap designs, creating compatibility and consistency issues.
Pros of Angular
Advantage of TypeScript – The superset for JavaScript offers superior navigation, refactoring services, and autocomplete, eliminating errors within code while developing enterprise-scale applications.
Google Support – Long-term Google support backed with detailed documentation and further possibilities of expanding the framework with improved developmental features.
High Performance – Provides high performance to the developers ensured by the hierarchical dependency injection, Ivy renderer, AOT compiler, differential loading, and Angular Universal support.
Recommendation of Updates – Angular command-line interface provides time-to-time recommendations required for dependencies, loaders, and plugins.
Third-party Integrations – The framework allows easy integration of third-party applications, providing more flexibility and tools for the development progress.
Customizable Framework – Elements and modules can be easily integrated from other frameworks and customized as per the developer’s requirements. Reusing and managing Angular HTML elements is also possible by wrapping them as a DOM element.
Cons of Angular
Complexity – Despite its component-based architecture, the management of components and repetitiveness make the frontend framework verbose for its development community.
Angular Versions – Migrating from AngularJS to Angular is a huge hassle for the developers, even more, when the framework application is vast. Moreover, learning about each version makes the learning curve steeper and decreases its popularity.
Heavily weighted framework – Simple and small applications can become bloated because of their requirements of boilerplate codes, abstractions, and other bundled features.
Comparison points:
- Performance Comparison
- Application Architecture
- Ease of Testing
- Scalability
- Suitability for Building Complex Applications
- Security
- User Experience
- Rapid Development
- Application Size
- Code Maintainability
- Learning Curve
Check out the original article published here: Bootstrap vs Angular: A Brief Comparison of Frontend Frameworks