As local market trends begin to skew towards React, it’s easy to question the future of demand for Angular. It’s a one or the other kind of game and makes you wonder which once you should pick up, especially when you’re just entering the fray.

Since Facebook changed React’s BSD licensing to MIT, the library appears to be exploding in every corner of the global development market. However, what a lot of entrepreneurs and startups don’t realize until later down the line is that React isn’t a complete front end system — it is just one library, one building block of many to help quickly scale a small application into larger, compartmentalized and component based system.

The React vs Angular debate

Facebook is often used as the prime example of its success. But React is only a tiny drop in the multitude of technologies the tech giant employs. It is after all, just a JavaScript UI library.

Angular, however, is a collection of libraries that work together a cohesive unit.

There are things that Angular do well that React omits, while other theoretical implementations of the latter is much better executed. Developers will always be biased towards what they know best and as a result, refuse to look into other paradigms that may be better suited for the situation — or perhaps this kind of thinking is often regulated to those who sits at the junior and intermediate levels. Despite React’s rise in popular, Angular still continues to have strong support from an equally, if not larger, tech giant known as Google. Conferences and developer advocates are equally strong for both JavaScript based front end methodologies. However, we may have another rising underdog that sits in between Angular and React in terms of offerings.

We need to talk about Vue

Vue is the newest kid on the block and is gently creeping up in popularity, turning React into the popular middle child of the trio. While the community is much smaller than Angular and React, it is gaining in popularity due to it being lightweight, not as complicated as Angular but offers more than React’s core functionalities.

The creator of Vue actually has a background in AngularJS, which is much more aligned with the principles of React than the current version and methodologies of Angular we know.