Note: At the time of writing, AngularJS has already reached its end-of-life; it has been about 10 months since support officially stopped.

How I first encountered AngularJS

My first brush with AngularJS came around 2014, when a friend showed me a small mobile app built with Ionic. He was thrilled with the experience and suggested we adopt AngularJS for our next project. I was equally drawn to it—at that point I had spent two years writing jQuery and Razor templates, and AngularJS felt like a breath of fresh air. Its HTML templates and straightforward API spared me the tedium of manual DOM manipulation.

By the end of 2015, I had convinced my manager to let me build a new application using AngularJS. We planned for three months but ended up taking four to five, as it was our first venture with the framework.

AngularJS was, in short, my first front-end framework.

Working with AngularJS day in and day out

In 2016, I switched jobs and started using AngularJS for the front end, paired with .NET on the backend to build APIs. I began teaching AngularJS in January 2017.

Stumbling upon Angular

While I was writing and teaching AngularJS, I found out about Angular. It may come as a surprise, but these are two distinct frameworks. Angular 4 came out in 2017, and as soon as I read the documentation, I was hooked on TypeScript. Coming from years of .NET, it felt intuitive. What also stood out was the CLI—no more manually wiring up webpack or fiddling with configuration files.

I was admittedly ahead of many who still confuse the two frameworks. Around March 2017, I started learning from courses by Deborah Kurata. Soon after, I began teaching Angular and phased out AngularJS entirely. It also opened up new teaching opportunities for me.

The key differences between AngularJS and Angular

Let’s set aside the personal history and get to the technical distinctions between the two frameworks.

  • Language: AngularJS was built with JavaScript. Initially, the Angular team announced they would use TypeScript, which drew criticism from the community. It took a few years for the value to become obvious, but now just about every framework uses it. Later, TypeScript definitions were made available for AngularJS as well.

  • Template Engine: Both frameworks use HTML-based templates with built-in directives. Angular has a clear edge when it comes to type checking at compile time.

  • API: There are analogous APIs in AngularJS and Angular for things like HTTP, forms, and routing. AngularJS actually had one of the more advanced routers of its time, before other frameworks caught up.

  • CLI: AngularJS never had an official command-line interface. Angular introduced its CLI starting with version 4.

  • Feature Complete: Angular offers a more full-fledged toolset out of the box, including built-in unit testing support and build tooling. With AngularJS, these had to be set up by hand.

  • Releases: AngularJS hit its end of life in January 2022, with no further official support. Angular, by contrast, is still under active development, with a major release every six months.

  • Migration: Moving from AngularJS to Angular is not as painful as people often imagine. Angular has a dedicated guide to help with the transition. Once you’re on Angular, upgrading to a newer version is mostly automated via Angular CLI. Usually it only takes a few hours, unless you’ve fallen several versions behind. There’s also Sam’s course specifically focused on upgrading from AngularJS to Angular.

Where the confusion between AngularJS and Angular comes from

It’s fair to ask why there’s so much misinformation around Angular. Some of it falls on the Angular team itself, and here’s why.

When AngularJS was released in 2009, npm didn’t exist yet. Frameworks were typically loaded by adding scripts from a CDN or the local file system. Later, when npm became the standard way to distribute JavaScript packages, the AngularJS team published the library on npm. And what name did they pick?

You probably guessed it correctly.
They called it Angular.

On npm, it was distributed as Angular.

The modern Angular framework, by contrast, is published under @angular/core.

Even now, searching for “Angular npm” on Google often surfaces AngularJS as the first result, which only adds to the mix-ups. The search page now includes a message at the top pointing to Angular Core—something that wasn’t there a few years ago.

AngularJS vs Angular — figure 1

What you can do about it

This article isn’t a pitch to convince you to use Angular. It’s simply meant to present facts and help clear up the confusion that surrounds the framework.

If you ever hear someone say Angular has reached end-of-life, you can point them to this post as a reference.

Wrapping up

This post takes aim at the misinformation and negative talk circulating about Angular. Misleading statements from certain influencers confuse developers just starting out, and sometimes they miss the chance to be part of a vibrant supporting community.

I’m not trying to sound harsh—many content creators do great work, and I respect that. But I’m tired of hearing “Angular is dead” from voices who haven’t done their homework.

If that describes you, please avoid passing along false claims or steering newcomers down the wrong path.

References

Hiring

By the way, I’m looking to hire Angular developers for my team in Germany and Spain. If you’re interested, send me a DM on Twitter.