When comparing Aurelia vs Angular, the Slant community recommends Aurelia for most people. In the question“What are the best client-side JavaScript MV* frameworks?” Aurelia is ranked 5th while Angular is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Aurelia is:
Full support for Typescript built in
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Out of the box Typescript support
Full support for Typescript built in
Pro Good binding system
Clear, intuitive and HTML/SVG compliant binding syntax.
Examples:
Default binding => value.bind
One Way binding => value.one-way
Two Way binding => value.two-way
One Time binding => value.one-time
Pro Conventions over configurations
Configured to give you the most common use cases by convention, which means you only need to change the default configuration for edge cases. This means that for normal cases far less boiler plate code has to be written.
Pro Out of the box ES6 support
Aurelia includes native support for ES6 and even comes with a Gulpfile which helps with transpiling ES6 code to ES5.
Pro Allows developers to build their application however they want
Aurelia is extremely unopinionated and was designed to be highly modular. This gives the developer the freedom to develop their application however they want, without forcing them in paradigms or rules predefined by the framework. Likewise, any of the individual components can be swapped out if so desired.
Pro Standards compliant
Aurelia developers always try to keep within existing and emerging Web Standards, making it easier for developers to follow best practices in web development.
Pro Agnostic code
Most of the code you write is Aurelia-agnostic. It's one of the closest libraries that you'll find to basically write plain-old, vanilla Javascript or TypeScript code (classes) and doesn't polluate your HTML/SCSS. That way you can easily test it, switch to another implementation and make it look clean (business oriented). Even the HTML.
Pro Easy to learn
Learning aurelia basically means learning EcmaScript and HTML, since aurelia is designed for standards compliance. Also, aurelia embraces upcoming ES language features by convention, such as ES class decorators for dependency injection, encouraging clean architecture and future-proof code.
Pro Variable binding helps with self-documenting the code
The syntax used to bind variables within the application class is very similar to Javascript itself. You can specify the type of the binding you are using explicitly, which practically self-documents your code and makes it easy to understand whether a value is one-way or two-way binded.
Pro Structure
Aurelia.js consists of modules that can be used as a full framework or separately.
Pro Great documentation
One of the most crucial pieces of any new technology or framework is the documentation. At present even though Aurelia is pre-beta, the documentation is pretty complete. There are code examples missing and whatnot, but for the most part it is concise and makes the main parts of the application easy to understand.
Pro Full commercial support
Aurelia is officially backed by Durandal Inc. and has commercial and enterprise support is available.
Pro Data binding choices with sane defaults
Aurelia defaults to one-way data binding, alining with conventional wisdom. However, there are times when two-way data binding proves useful, such as binding an input widget with a view-model. Aurelia makes two-way data binding available to developers and uses it by convention when appropriate.
Pro Plays well with other frameworks
Aurelia can be used alongside of React and Polymer, since it is designed for interoperability. In practice, this means Aurelia developers can use React components by including an Aurelia custom element:
https://github.com/Vheissu/aurelia-react-example/blob/master/README.md
It also works well with Polymer, since they are both based on the WebComponents standards:
http://aurelia.io/hub.html#/doc/article/aurelia/framework/latest/integrating-with-polymer
Pro Powerful helper CLI available
https://github.com/aurelia/cli
The CLI helps rapid creation of projects with generators, building, deploying and hot reloads. Webpack should be coming soon.
Pro Growing community
The Aurelia community is growing at a great pace. Still doesn’t rival the big players line Angular or React, but the answer to an Aurelia issue is a quick question away on their Discourse.
Pro Provides dependency injection
With dependency injection, you can load in extra javascript and new functionality just when you need it.
This is particularly helpful with testing as you can swap out services for test services.
It also means in single page apps you can load dependencies only as you need them instead of loading them up all up at the start.
Pro Support for a composable component oriented architecture with directives
Angular uses the existing HTML structure and builds on top of it instead of requiring you to learn a new templating language. Because it's just vanilla HTML, it is more familiar, and easier for beginners to learn. Directives let Angular know which HTML elements are under its control, and how to use them.
Being directly on the HTML it's more transparent what's going on, and it's possible to get a good idea of what the page is doing just by looking at the template.
Also, it makes embedding possible, as you could have an angular app within an existing site so you don't have to rewrite everything at once.
Pro Easy and straightforward data-binding
Data bindings are done on the DOM, which allows you to easily sync data between various parts of the DOM in a very succint matter.
<body ng-app>
<span>Insert your name:</span>
<input type="text" ng-model="user.name" />
<h3>Echo: {{user.name}}</h3>
</body>
This snippet shows how the model attribute "name" is easily bound across different parts of the DOM without having to set up any extra boilerplate.
Pro Provides dependency injection
With dependency injection, you can load in extra javascript and new functionality just when you need it.
This is particularly helpful with testing as you can swap out services for test services.
It also means in single page apps you can load dependencies only as you need them instead of loading them up all up at the start.
Pro Huge ecosystem of third party components
Angular is an extremely popular JavaScript framework. Because of this, developers have developed a myriad of components which can be downloaded and integrated into any Angular application.
Pro Huge community that is quickly growing
Angular has the largest community out of all Javascript MV* frameworks and there are a lot of tutorials and guides out there for new and old users alike.
Pro All best practices
Cons
Con No big success stories yet
There are no notable big web products build with aurelia yet
Con Needs more support from the community
It would be great to have a lot of plugins made by the community, or video tutorials from experiences when using it. Hopefully in the near term future.
Con Two-way data binding is often considered an anti-pattern
Two-way data-binding means that a HTML element in the view and an Angular model are binded, and when one of them is changed so is the other. One-way data-binding for example does not change the model when the HTML element is changed.
This is a rather controversial subject and many developers consider two-way data binding an anti-pattern and something that is useless in complex applications because it's very easy to create complex situations by using it and being unable to debug them easily or understand what's happening by just looking at the code.
Con Steep learning curve
Angular isn't a simple framework, and because much of the magic goes on behind the scenes, it isn't easy to go from simply using the framework to being able to actually change how it works and extend it.
Con It is almost mandatory to use Typescript
Although ES standard can be used, most of the documentation and resources are with Typescript.
Con HTML template does not comply to standards
Attributes are case-sensitive, which is against the HTML standards.
Con Difficult to use for isomorphic apps that render the initial template on the server in a performant way. Non issue for enterprise apps.
Con Explicit configuration
Users will usually need to specify stuff that is very obvious (template location, providers etc. ).
Con Two-way data binding is often considered an anti-pattern
Two-way data-binding means that a HTML element in the view and an Angular model are binded, and when one of them is changed so is the other. One-way data-binding for example does not change the model when the HTML element is changed.
This is a rather controversial subject and many developers consider two-way data binding an anti-pattern and something that is useless in complex applications because it's very easy to create complex situations by using it and being unable to debug them easily or understand what's happening by just looking at the code.