Blazor VS Angular which one is better and why?

Angular, formerly known as AngularJS until 2016, was created to allow frontend developers to interact with both frontend and backend at the same time. This was very helpful at the time, especially because the backend was usually built with other languages, like C# or Java, meaning it was generally maintained by a different set of developers.

With the advent of SPAs, Angular became even stronger, and new competing frameworks arose, like Microsoft’s Blazor. Blazor is a web framework that allows C# to be run along with HTML and CSS, creating components and generating SPAs. It was written under the .NET platform, bringing all the power of Microsoft’s framework, both in the client and the server.

In this article, we’ll compare Angular and Blazor. We’ll analyze the community strengths of each framework, as well as their PWA/SPA support, a sync nature, and architecture.

Fundamentals of Angular

Angular is a web framework that allows for SPAs, meaning the frontend code runs in the browser. It was one of the first frameworks to do this, allowing developers to easily create single page apps with minimal code. It’s built with TypeScript, which is a superset of JavaScript, which shares the syntax of JavaScript while adding features, like static typing. One of Angular’s biggest assets is the large number of resources available for it.

It has a large and active community, with plenty of conferences and meetups, as well as a huge number of online tutorials and documentation. Conversely, Angular’s biggest weakness is its steep learning curve. It’s one of the more complicated frameworks out there, and comes with a very high bar for entry.

Fundamental of Blazor

Blazor is a web framework created by Microsoft. It allows for a choice between a SPAs and server-side rendered apps. Apps created with Blazor run on .NET Core, meaning they can be used on the backend too. Blazor apps are written in C#, and can use .NET libraries and frameworks, like ASP.NET Core. Blazor has a fairly new community, but one growing rapidly. There aren’t as many books and tutorials for it as for the other frameworks, but the community is working on building them. Blazor is great for apps that need fast load times, as it renders content both on the client and the server.

Angular vs Blazor

Let’s take a look at how these two frameworks stack up against each other. Blazor VS Angular

Community Strength - Blazor’s community is growing rapidly, with plenty of meetups and conferences, as well as a large number of online tutorials and documentation. Blazor’s community is still quite small in comparison with Angular’s, but it’s growing quickly.

PWA/SPA Support - With Blazor, you have a choice between server-side rendering or PWA/SPAs. With Angular, you can create SPAs, but there’s no way to switch from a SPA to a server-side rendered app. Blazor has a lot of support for PWAs, even without the .NET Core tooling. Angular does have PWA support, but it’s on the less powerful Ionic framework and requires using a different syntax.

Async Nature - Blazor is an asynchronous framework, meaning it uses async/await, while Angular is synchronous. Blazor’s asynchronous nature allows it to be much more efficient, while Angular’s synchronous nature has been known to cause stuttering and other performance issues.

Build Compilation - With angular V13 you will find that view engine is completely removed instead of that this framework now uses new rendering engine called Ivy. Which in result in better and faster compilation and productivity. You will find one more improvement which improved the build speed which is build-cache is enabled by default for all the new projects.

On the other hand Blazor is very fast as it takes efficient advantage of visual studio and plugins meaning, the development and debugging is really fast. One the interesting feature of blazor is gives live reloading feature while development that too we can setup in no time. It also saves you from going through a whole API Structure which we use in Angular.

Architecture - Blazor has been written with a SPA architecture in mind, which makes it’s organized around components, while Angular has a framework-first approach. Blazor’s components allow for a high level of flexibility, while Angular’s framework-first design makes it more difficult to customize.

Which one is better?

In terms of which one is better, we would have to say that Blazor and Angular both are good and share many similarities. Blazor has all the same features as Angular, but with less complexity. It’s also a better choice for those who want to switch between server-side rendering and a PWA/SPA. Blazor is a new framework, and therefore, there are still a few quirks and bugs to work out, but it’s definitely a framework to watch out for! Finally, Blazor has a lot of potential, with a young and growing community, as well as all the advantages of using .NET on the client and server. Blazor is the future of frontend web development, and we can’t wait to see where it goes!

Use cases -

Building your UI angular.

Angular adopts a components approach to building your UI. Angular UI:

Comprises one or more components is typically written using typescript or javaScript and special angular directives runs on the browsers java Scripts engine.

Building your UI with blazor

Blazor adopts a very similar approach to angular in that you build your UI using components, but you get to use Razor and C# (instead of angular directives and javaScript) to write your markup and UI logic. A Blazor UI:

Comprises one or more components.

Is written using Razor and C#(Which takes your markup and data, and combines them together)

Runs on webAssembly in the browser.

Routing in Angular

In most application you'll want to be able to handle routes. so, for example, if someone accesses "about" they might see your about "page" (which will actually render one or more components).

Angular handles routes via @angular/router and by default it looks for routes defined in an array in app-routing.module.ts.

Routing in Blazor

Blazor ships routing "out of the box" and leans on ASP.NET's esixting routing engine. you ca easily make any Blazor component "routable" by adding a @page declaration at the top of your component.

You can also pass data in via the route.

Fetching Data from an API using Angular

Angular advocates using services to fetch or save data in your components. The concept is that the component itself should be unaware of the specific details of how data is fetched or saved.

Fetching data from an API using Blazor

Blazor leas on .NET 's HttpClient for fetching data. Under the hood, this defers to the native fetch API, but you can generally just ignore that and use the abstraction.

Shared Models - Blazor's way of interaction with UI and API

Blazor has a useful trick up it's sleeve (compared to Angular, or any other existing frontend framework) when it comes to the interaction between your UI and API. Because you're writing your web app in C#, you can use the same data models in your frontend and backend (API) code.

Let's say for example you need to retrieve a list of people.

The person model lives in a shared class library. Both your web API and blazor client projects reference this shared library. Now your API can be strongly types, returning (and accepting) data using the person model.

The data is still serialized and sent over the wire" as JSON data, but your Blazor application can desterilize the JSON data using the exact same person model that was used to serialize it in the first place.

Now if you make breaking changes to your person mode, you'll immediately see complication errors if you've introduced any breaking changes which affect either the client or server use of the model

Parting advice

We hope after reading this article, you have a better idea of how Angular and Blazor stack up against each other. Talking about Angular, it does stand out alone in some important points. As it's in the market for so long.

Blazor could be hard to catch for frontend developer who have never worked on backend language. Finding experience developer would be a challenge. Whereas blazor is designed keeping lot of flexibility and compatibility in mind. which makes it powerful framework.

Besides from carrying difference Angular and Balzor have some in common also. From routing system to range of libraries to deal with HTTP calls.

We hope that you also found our comparisons to be helpful, and that you’re excited to get building apps with Blazor!

                    Aakarshi Dave