As the web development technologies are evolving like never before, recent years have witnessed the immense growth of JavaScript. Being an incredibly powerful programming language, new frameworks based on JavaScript are constantly adding value to businesses and helping them to create robust web and mobile applications. As JavaScript is used everywhere, from web browsers to mobile, IoT, Server-side, etc it has been dominating web development everywhere. Seeing the current market trends, Angular.Js and Node.Js is gaining huge popularity and is being used by several market giants to build their web & mobile apps. If you too have a project in hand and are wondering which technology to go with, this post will help you spot the key differences between the two.

Key differences you must know between Angular.Js & Node Js development

Up till 2019, Javascript has been the most utilized programming language among developers worldwide with 61.8% as per the survey by Statista. Considering the fact that both Angular.Js and Node.Js are widely used JavaScript-based technologies, many of you would go in a dilemma as to which one to go for. Before you hire Angularjs developer or hire Node js developer for your next web development project, this post will help you understand the difference between the two technologies to help you pick the most suitable one for your project.

Before we proceed to spot out the differences between the two, you must know that Angular.Js is a JavaScript framework while the Node.Js is a cross-platform runtime environment. On the surface, the technologies may sound similar but both the technologies are unique in their own ways, having different functionalities all together. Node.Js is primarily used for writing server-side scripts to build back-ends of web applications while Angular.Js is a front-end JavaScript framework design used to build interactive web app interfaces. Both the technologies i.e. NodeJS and AngularJS differ from each other widely in terms of architecture, functionality, performance, and usage.

Let us understand the important differences between NodeJS And AngularJS based on the following factors:

Core Architecture

Angular.Js: It is an open-source framework developed by Google in 2009. It is among the few technologies that are built, maintained, and backed up by tech giant, Google itself with a huge community of developers. Unlike other frameworks of JavaScript, Angular is written entirely in JavaScript that also follows its syntax rules strictly.

Node.Js: It is a cross-platform runtime environment that is built upon on Google's V8 JavaScript engine that can go with multiple operating systems for great performance. However, it is written using different programming languages including Javascript, C, and C++. The Node JS framework is mainly used for building web servers and scalable back-ends of web applications. On the other hand, the Angular JavaScript framework can be used to build structured applications for both mobile and web.

Deployment Process

Node.Js: With Node.Js, developers can write applications code in javaScript. But since it has a run-time environment, and the applications need to run within the run-time environment on several platforms including Windows, Linux & OS, the developers are also required to install Node.json their systems. This must be done in order to create a development environment.

Angular.Js: Unlike Node.Js, Angular developers are not required to install Angular.Js framework or any other framework in their computer system. The developers can directly embed the Angular framework code just like any other JavaScript file. This implies that the deployment process becomes easy with Angular.Js.

Web Framework

Angular.Js: This is a web framework, unlike Node.Js. The web framework can be used by the developers to automate some common development tasks and perform the tasks quickly while creating websites, web applications, web services, or web application framework.

Node.Js: On the other hand, JavaScript developers cannot use Node.Js as a web framework to create applications.  For this, they must choose several Node.Js based frameworks like Socket.io, Hapi.js, Meteor.js, Express.js, among others to perform the desired tasks. However, these recently launched Node.Js based frameworks like Express are immensely gaining popularity and are widely being adopted by several giants throughout the world. 

MVC architectural Pattern & Other Features

Angular.Js: Considering features is the key to choosing the desired technology for your project. Given the fact that both Angular.Js and Node.Js support MVC architectural pattern, it implies that you can scale up your operations whenever requires by using these technologies. However, both of them come with a different set of features. Talking about Angular.Js, it provides excellent features like data binding, directives, filters, deep linking, dependency injection and many more to create dynamic web applications.

Node.Js: As a server-side framework, Node.Js offers several outstanding features to developers for building server-side and networking applications. Node.Js technology helps the developers in using asynchronous APIs and a single-threaded event mechanism that helps to deal with multiple concurrent connections simultaneously. This improves the code drastically and ensures speedy load time, which enables the programmers to deliver data in chunks without buffering.

Writing Database Queries

Angular.Js: Despite both the technologies supporting MVC architectural pattern, Angular.Js also supports two-way data binding. This implies that the data of the web application is automatically synchronized between the model and the view components. However, Angular.Js does not provide any feature or support for writing database queries.

Node.Js: In contrast to Angular.js, Node.Js enables the developers to write database queries in JavaScript. This makes it easy for developers to create database queries, even non-relational databases by overcoming syntactical differences and building robust web applications. 

Technology Implementation

Angular.Js: This technology is widely picked up by Angular developers for building interactive single-page and client-side web applications. Being a web framework, it further makes it easier for programmers to write intuitive & real-time applications.

Node.Js: On the other hand, NodeJS is primarily used by developers to create fast and scalable server-side and networking applications. The features provided by the cross-platform runtime environment further help developers to build applications with real-time collaborative editing & drawing.

Key Takeaways

As you compare different aspects of Angular.Js with Node.Js you will realize that both the technologies are competent and have their own set of advantages and disadvantages. Based on your project requirements and the kind of application you want to build, you can choose the right platform for you to roll out your next big web application!