Why NgRx Store deserves a place in every Angular project
During a recent appearance on Tech Talks with Santosh, hosted by Santosh Yadav, I shared a viewpoint that tends to stir up debate:
If your application is big enough to use Angular, it is big enough to use NgRx
Naturally, this is my personal stance, and this article is intentionally opinionated. Still, I will do my best to lay out the reasoning behind why I believe NgRx deserves consideration for every Angular project.
What you stand to gain far outweighs the effort
Granted, when a team has zero prior exposure to NgRx, adopting a new technology—and an entirely different mental model—can feel like a significant hurdle. Some aspects of reactive programming, the Flux architecture, and heavy reliance on RxJS may initially seem intimidating. Yet, from what I have seen working with NgRx, a dedicated effort is all it takes to move from an imperative mindset to a more functional one. Within a matter of days, a developer can reach a comfortable level of familiarity with Flux and NgRx because:
The underlying concepts are not nearly as intimidating as their names suggest. Terms like Actions, Reducers, and Effects sound daunting, but an action is simply a unique object that describes an event affecting state, a reducer is a pure function that derives new state from an action, and so forth. Learning NgRx is not trivial, but it is far less demanding than picking up an entirely new framework like Angular itself—and the ROI makes it worthwhile.
Each concept builds naturally upon the previous one. Once you understand actions and see them dispatched, reducers become obvious. After reducers, selectors make sense. From there, Effects are a logical next step. Before long, all the pieces click together and NgRx becomes part of your daily workflow.
A note of caution: I would advise against introducing NgRx if basic RxJS fundamentals are missing. But if you are comfortable with operators like map/filter/startWith and can combine streams with combineLatest/mergeMap, you are ready to begin learning NgRx.
In short, NgRx is easier to learn than many expect, and the payoff is substantial. If the objection to NgRx has been "too much overhead to adopt," that stance deserves revisiting.
The upside is not just greater than the risk—it is enormous
NgRx brings three major advantages to an application:
A single source of truth for all data. This makes it straightforward to track where and when data changes and how those changes ripple through the UI. The centralized architecture also simplifies debugging: unexpected state changes point to a reducer problem, incorrect state transformations indicate a selector issue, and so on.
A clear, almost formulaic approach to solving frontend problems, which makes applications remarkably scalable. NgRx imposes a simple yet rigid structure—down to the folder layout—for how your frontend should work. As a result, most tasks and UI components become routine.
Outstanding devtools that make diagnosing and tracing issues far easier. You can see exactly when and where something went wrong.
Together, these points contribute to an application that is as maintainable and scalable as possible. This is not merely theoretical—it becomes tangible the first time a feature requirement changes after the feature is already built. Picture this scenario: a user picks a value from a dropdown in one component, which triggers an HTTP request, and if that succeeds, a second request fires to update UI in a different component.
Now consider modifying a codebase that does not use NgRx to accommodate such a change. You would need a mechanism to notify the other component of the dropdown change (perhaps a service with a subject), subscribe to that notification in the other component while remembering to handle unsubscription via takeUntil, inject a new data service, make the HTTP call, store the result locally, and refresh the UI. That is a lot of manual wiring.
With NgRx, the same change is minimal: if the second component already selects the relevant state, you simply dispatch another action from the corresponding Effects class—likely just 1–3 lines. If the state is not yet selected, add a single select call and you are done. Clear, concise, easy to reason about, and nearly bug-free.
Angular apps actually become easier to follow with NgRx
Some developers worry that adding another layer of abstraction will only make things more complicated and harder to navigate.
Experience with NgRx suggests the opposite: explicit, rigid code—even if longer—is preferable to compact but chaotic code. Without NgRx, it is difficult to discern what data each component depends on or how components influence one another just by reading the code. With NgRx, those relationships are explicit: data enters through one path, flows through a single location, and remains immutable. Understanding a codebase becomes straightforward. Curious how state can change? Read the action names. Want the exact transformation logic? Read the reducer—typically self-explanatory like most pure functions. Need to know which data is fetched externally? Check an Effect.
Wrapping up
NgRx is more than a library or a tool—it is a philosophy. Adopting it involves a learning curve and a shift in mindset, but once that investment is made, the benefits become apparent throughout the development process. After a few months, building Angular applications without NgRx will feel far more difficult.