MERN vs MEAN Stacks - React Angular Mean Mern

Introduction

MEAN and MERN are two of the stacks that have sprung up as JavaScript has evolved. Although the web is still primarily built upon HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, users now demand richer experiences and to meet the needs of the increasing demands of today’s end users Angular and React have better equipped developers to do so and out of that came new stacks built upon these technologies.

These stacks share three components, MongoDB, Express, and NodeJS. Where the two differ is MEAN uses Angular and MERN uses React. These stacks are entirely written in Javascript and are easy to adopt. Because most developers are familiar with Javascript this makes development in these stacks quick and helps produce prototypes and launch applications quickly. These stacks help reduce the total cost of development of an application by increasing the efficiency of the development team.

React or Angular

Both Angular and React are used to organize and render the app’s presentation layer. Both options are used with MongoDb, Express, and Node to achieve the same results. The difference between the two is that Angular is a framework which come with a lot of rules and patterns to be followed, and React is just a javascript library.

Angular is a framework and with a framework comes some baggage but also some benefits. Frameworks have patterns and rules for how your code is organized and written. This can help you organize your code and let Angular some functionality behind the scenes but at there is a learning curve to learning any new framework. Angular follows the MVC architecture. Out of the box, it provides helper functions and built in functionality to do things like making http requests.

A library provides only a toolkit for abstracting different layers of your code. This makes it easy to render UI elements and control the state of your app. Using a library helps developers spend more time writing JavaScript and less time worrying about the framework-specific code.

Pros and Cons

Performance

Angular uses a more reliable, yet expensive way to keep the view sync with the underlying data model by using two-way data binding. This can become expensive when an application has large numbers of variables which it needs to check on the fly. React has a more intuitive way to handle change events by using a unidirectional data to check for changes. It outperforms Angular when rendering and updating larger sets of data.

Architecture

The main difference between the two is whether you want to use a library or a framework. React make rendering intuitive, fast, and easy, and it’s just like any other javascript library. With a framework, developers can better organize their code using an Model View Controller (MVC) architecture. Because React is just a javascript library and not a framework, it can be harder for developers to maintain their code because the library does not enforce any organization principles.

Conclusion

The MEAN ( MongoDB, Express, Angular, NodeJS) stack and the MERN ( MongoDB, Express, React, NodeJS ) stack are both very popular choices for modern applications. MEAN has been in the market for a longer time compared to MERN. Choosing between these two stacks for your development can be tough so we suggest you think about the topics we discussed here as well as examine your developers skillsets.