PHP vs Angular: What Should Developers Choose?

Developing web apps and websites that scale efficiently and offer Fort Knox-level security is a dream of every developer. And using such a product is the desire of every user. Hence, choosing the most suitable and reliable technologies for your projects is highly critical.

While PHP and Angular are entirely different technologies — PHP vs JavaScript is a more apt comparison — they’re both used extensively in web development (sometimes together). So, why this piece? During our research, we found that “PHP vs Angular” is a relatively popular search query.

This article will settle the debate about PHP vs Angular and help you choose the most suitable tech for your next project.

Ready? Let’s get cracking!

PHP vs Angular: Why the Comparison?

Before comparing Angular with PHP, it’s essential to understand a little about them. So let’s uncover what these technologies are, their key features, and their applications.

What Is Angular?

Angular is an open source TypeScript-based framework for developing web and desktop applications. The Angular project was led by Google’s Angular team and developed with help from a community of many individuals and corporations. As it’s a complete rewrite of AngularJS (Angular 1), it’s also known as “Angular v2 and above” or “Angular 2+.”

Released in 2016 with an MIT license, Angular is used primarily for frontend web development. At present, we have a total of 12 Angular versions, with the latest one released on May 12, 2021.

Angular includes a component-based web framework to help you develop scalable web apps. It also has a wide range of integrated libraries covering several vital features, like forms management, client-server communication, routing, and more.

Angular vs AngularJS

Angular is often confused with AngularJS. It’s not surprising, as Angular is a significant update of AngularJS. Hence, it’s essential to know the differences between Angular vs AngularJS:

Features

• Open source: Angular is open source and free.
• Cross-platform support: You can build applications and websites for all platforms mobile, web, native desktop, and native mobile and operating systems like Windows, Linux, and Mac.
• Performance and speed: Angular converts templates into highly-optimized code for JavaScript virtual machines. It offers instant rendering of apps in just CSS and HTML and facilitates better SEO optimization. Additionally, Angular applications load faster with Component Router, delivering automatic code splitting.
• Scalability: The Angular framework is highly scalable that helps developers meet massive data requirements by creating data models over Immutable.js or other push models.
• Simple interface: It has declarative templates that help you build app features like UI views quite faster. You can also extend its template language using components.
• Productivity: You can instantly start creating apps, adding tests and components, and deploying using command-line tools. It offers intelligent code completion, quick error check, and feedback in leading IDEs and editors.
• Testing: Dependency injection present in Angular helps you test code by injecting dummy or mock data into your controller. Next, it assesses its behavior and output and utilizes nonexistent HTTP providers to push counterfeit responses into controllers from servers.
• Built-in components: Angular has functional, built-in features like navigation elements, buttons, layout, data tables, indicators, and more. Therefore, Angular can easily create intuitive app interfaces and develop apps like Gmail, Android OS, Google Drive, etc.
• Code reusability: It helps you save time and accelerates your development process.

Applications

Angular is finding wide usage these days due to its impeccable features for creating high-performance and scalable applications. Here are just a few of its possible uses:

• To build progressive web apps: You can use Angular to develop high-performing progressive web apps to deliver offline, app-like experiences with zero-step installation.
• For desktop app development: Angular is used to create desktop applications compatible across Windows, macOS, and Linux.
• To develop native apps: Angular framework works with mobile, and hence, you can use it to create mobile applications.
• To create single-page apps: By retrieving a webpage’s critical parts (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) in a single instance, Angular can handle complexities easily. Thus, it can be one of the best options to develop single-page apps.
• To create animations: The intelligent API of Angular lets you create high-performance animations and complex choreographies involving fewer lines of code.
• To create accessible apps: You can create accessible apps with developer guides, built-in a11y testing infrastructure, and ARIA-enabled components.

Additionally, creating certain apps in Angular is seamless, including video streaming applications such as YouTube and PlayStation; ecommerce apps; real-time data apps such as weather.com; and content-focused and news websites like The Guardian.

What Is PHP?

PHP is a recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (originally, it stood for Personal Home Page). It’s primarily a general-purpose scripting language for server-side web development.

Designed in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf, a Danish-Canadian programmer, PHP is now developed and maintained by The PHP Development Team and Zend Technologies. The standard PHP software is free under the PHP License. It supports nearly all operating systems, platforms, and web servers without any cost.

PHP was released in 1995, and since then, its dedicated developer community has brought about several modifications. As a result, the latest major PHP version is PHP 8.

In general, PHP code is processed with the help of a PHP interpreter on a server and implemented in a module, executable CGI, or daemon. Finally, it results in an HTTP response.

This programming language is one of the most popular ones used to develop many websites and applications worldwide.

According to W3Techs, more than 79% of all sites with known server-side programming languages use PHP.

Popular sites using PHP include WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Canva, Facebook, and Salesforce, among many others.

Features

The main features of PHP are:

• Free: PHP’s standard license is free. Therefore, anyone can easily download, install, and use it to complete their web development projects. Developers can also check its code and contribute to bug fixes and new features.
• Simplicity: Developers love working with PHP due to its simplicity, whether beginner or experienced. It’s easy to learn and is similar to C in terms of syntax with its logical, organized structure.
• Performance: The database connectivity and data loading are faster in PHP. Therefore, it’s also efficient in database management, server administration, mail functionality, and so on. Make sure to read our PHP benchmarks blog post.
• Object-oriented programming: Like C++, PHP is an object-oriented programming language with useful features such as data encapsulation, abstraction, inheritance, polymorphism, etc.
• Compatibility: PHP supports cross-platform compatibility and runs across multiple operating systems such as macOS, Windows, Unix, Linux, and more. Its scripts also work seamlessly across different servers like Apache and IIS and devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops.
• Real-time Monitoring: PHP enables you to fetch server logs easily so that you can monitor resource utilization like memory, CPU, and other data.
• Flexibility: The embedding capability of PHP is excellent; hence, you can integrate it easily with other technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, XML, and others.
• Database support: It supports multiple databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Oracle, etc. Being database-friendly, you can add, change, or delete data directly in the database system.
• Exceptional handling: PHP generates quick error warnings as it supports error-reporting constants. It allows you to spot bugs and errors easily and fix them before they cause any big trouble.

In addition to all these features, PHP facilitates magic constants, cookies, regular expressions, shell command line execution, PDO class, and more.

Applications

Even though PHP is a general-purpose scripting language, developers mainly use PHP for server-side web development. Nevertheless, there are a lot of applications of PHP, both in and beyond a web context:

• Creating websites and web applications: PHP lets you create modern, interactive applications and websites with greater customization and a user-friendly interface. To accomplish this, it utilizes a 3-tier web architecture that supports your server, browsers, and database systems linearly. As a result, these web-based products are high-performing and capable of integrating with many services and facilitating secure online payments.
• Building ecommerce apps: PHP makes it easy for you to build ecommerce apps. You can use PHP-based web frameworks such as Laravel, CodeIgniter, Symfony, and many others. PHP enables apps to scale seamlessly and is helpful for both early-stage startups to big enterprises. Some of the ecommerce platforms that leverage PHP are Magento, WooCommerce, and Shopify.
• Creating Content Management Systems (CMS): CMS has become immensely useful for content marketing. PHP helps create web CMS platforms without hassles so you can meet this demand. It supports multiple databases and can interact easily with various services via protocols like POP3, HTTP, IMAP, COM, SNMP, and more.
• Representing data: With PHP, you can use tools like Image_Graph to create data presentations in a vast number of formats, including graphs and charts like pie charts, lines, bars, columns, and more.
• Building GUI-based applications: Using GUI like ZZEE, PHP-GTK2, etc., that support PHP scripts, you can create GUI-based applications.
• Image processing and graphic design: PHP is helpful in image processing and graphic design. You can integrate PHP-based apps and libraries like Imagine, ImageMagic, and GD library. In addition, you can create thumbnails, rotate images, resize and crop them, add watermarks, and take out pictures in several image formats like PNG, JPEG, GIF, etc.
• Robotic Drone control: You can use PHP for drone control. People also use it to calculate, download, upload, and display data interactively.

Using PHP With Angular

If you’re wondering whether you can use PHP alongside Angular, the answer is yes. But Angular will still need a separate client-server architecture.

In general, PHP runs on the server-side while Angular runs on the client-side. Therefore, to establish communication between them, you would need an API.

Use Angular to create the entire frontend of the application or site, and use PHP to create the API to communicate with the frontend and the database.

The application frontend uses Angular’s HTTP request techniques like GET and POST for data transfer between the UI and database. So you can transfer this data in JSON, manage it in the PHP code to store it in the database, and forward it to the UI as required.

PHP vs Angular: A Detailed Comparison

Now that you have a bit idea about PHP vs Angular, along with their features and applications, let’s compare them to help you decide which one you should use in your next project.

Note: Since PHP and Angular are distinct technologies, it’s not feasible to make a strict one-on-one comparison. We’ll discuss their strengths and weakness in many areas to help you decide better.

PHP vs Angular: Language vs Web Framework

The first and the most significant aspect of PHP vs Angular comparison is that PHP is a programming language while Angular is a TypeScript-based framework.

They’re both aimed at web and application development, but what they are in their true nature is different.

Now, if you compare their programming languages, TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript, or you can say Typed JavaScript. Hence, JavaScript programs are TypeScript programs as well.

Developed by Microsoft in 2012, this language offers optional static typing. TypeScript was designed to create large apps and transcompilers for JavaScript and ease component development complex in JavaScript.

PHP, on the other hand, is a poorly designed programming language compared to TypeScript. Its inconsistencies in terms of function names and argument order, slow adoption of versions, and more are common complaints.

PHP vs Angular: Frontend vs Backend

Angular is one of the most versatile and advanced frontend web frameworks for building a fully-blown app based on TypeScript, which is generally used for frontend development.

PHP runs in a site or app’s backend, it remains hidden for the visitors. For example, PHP performs its work on your web server and admin area in a WordPress website.

PHP vs Angular: Server-Side vs Client-Side Scripting

Angular works on the client-side on users’ smartphones, tablets, or laptops instead of servers. So, this also means that you would need another programming language for server-side scripting.

And PHP does just that. It is a server-side scripting language whose code is executed on a web server and results in an HTML response to a browser’s request. PHP lets you deliver dynamic content to users, usually from a database, being a server-side programming language. It is also instrumental in building ecommerce apps.

PHP vs Angular: Which Is Easier to Learn?

If you understand JavaScript, you won’t feel trouble understanding Angular, as it’s written in TypeScript, which is a superscript of JS.

However, both are pretty easy to learn. It’s because they’re similar to other programming languages like Java, C, and C++, and rely on programming fundamentals like objects, variables, scope, conditional statements, loops, and more. Hence, learning Angular or PHP is easy even for beginners.

However, mastering TypeScript can be a bit tougher compared to PHP. Plus, many PHP tutorials are available on the internet today, both free and paid to help you master the language.

PHP vs Angular: Case Sensitivity

Case sensitivity means that you must type the variables, function names, keywords, and other identifiers with proper capitalization, upper or lower.

For example, a while statement will always be written in lowercase and not as WHILE or While.

Angular is case-sensitive as it uses TypeScript, which is a case-sensitive programming language. But Angular’s directives, modules, and controllers are not case-sensitive. Hence, you need to be careful while using these.

For example, if you want to create a variable in Angular as $x and expect the value of $X, it’s not possible.

But PHP, on the other hand, is partially case-sensitive. So, again, be careful about it.

In PHP, strings, constants (by default), object properties, and variables are case-sensitive. However, functions, keywords, object methods, defined constants, and class names are case-insensitive.

For example, if you input a variable $x, which is case-sensitive, you will get the value of $x only and not $X.

But, if you input a function xY() in PHP, and then you want to call Xy(), XY(), or xy(), the function will run.

That being said, a PHP-based framework or CMS can define its own syntax. WordPress hooks and functions are a perfect example.

Being consistent while writing code is crucial, no matter what programming language you use.

PHP vs Angular: Ease of Installation

Installing modern frontend apps is not that easy. But, Angular offers a command-line interface called Angular CLI to make things easier. It eliminates copy-paste of configuration files to get the project to the development stage.

You can install Angular in some simple steps:

• Install the NPM package
• Install the Angular CLI through NPM
• Create a new project in Angular

Angular works across operating systems that include Windows, Linux, and Mac. So, go through their detailed documentation to check the exact steps to install Angular on your system, as there are a few different ways for each of them.

However, installing PHP is relatively easy. In addition, PHP works on multiple operating systems like Windows, Mac, and Linux.

To use it:

• Obtain space with a web host that supports MySQL and PHP.
• Install a server on your computer, then begin installing MySQL and PHP.

That’s it!

PHP vs Angular: Technology Stack

Angular belongs to the MEAN stack. Here, MEAN stands for four technologies covering the significant aspects of software development. These four technologies are:

• M: MongoDB, a non-relational or NoSQL database
• E: Express.js, a backend JavaScript framework
• A: Angular, a frontend web framework
• N: Node.js as the runtime environment

MEAN is an advanced technology stack used for full-stack software development as it has frontend and backend technologies. Its components are higher level and include an app presentation layer instead of an OS layer.

PHP belongs to the LAMP stack. Here, LAMP is the acronym for four technologies that are amongst the most used ones for web development. These are:

• L: Linux as the operating system
• A: Apache HTTP server
• M: MySQL, a relational database
• P: PHP, the programming language

These free, open source technologies are widely used across the world. They form the technology stack for CMS like WordPress, Drupal, etc.

PHP vs Angular: Performance & Speed

Performance and speed are crucial. Users expect your site to load within 2-3 seconds, and nobody has time for sluggish apps.

The programming language used is also a factor for site and app performance apart from hardware resources, storage, memory, etc.

As Angular uses TypeScript, it executes faster than PHP when measured on a single hardware. However, as it primarily works on the client-side, if a user’s machine isn’t powerful enough, so will Angular’s performance.

In addition, Angular delivers superb performance on mobile devices, especially smartphones whose usage is skyrocketing in the present world compared to desktop computers. It works seamlessly across mobile devices of different screen sizes, interface accessibility, and hardware. Furthermore, its native support to build mobile apps is fantastic and offers a higher level of scalability.

PHP’s early versions were slow for code execution. But with the introduction of PHP 7 and Zend Engine 3, the speed and performance of PHP have increased significantly. As a result, it has become faster than many programming languages such as Ruby, Python, Perl, and even TypeScript.

PHP 7 is capable of handling over 2x more user requests than PHP 5. PHP 8 goes even further. Read our in-depth PHP benchmarks for more information.

PHP 8 is also a significant PHP version that has improved changes from the last version in terms of features such as just-in-time compilation, match expression, and other changes in the syntax, library, and type annotations. All of them have made PHP more efficient and robust in coding aspects.

PHP vs Angular: Package Managers

Programming languages use package managers to accelerate the development process, so you don’t have to design everything from scratch.

A package can be a module of third-party reusable code that adds functionality to a software application.

Similarly, a package manager refers to a collection of software that helps you automate specific processes like installing, configuring, upgrading, and deleting software packages consistently. In addition, it maintains the software dependencies along with version information to avoid missing prerequisites and software mismatches. This way, it lets you focus on bigger things more such as application services and logic.

Angular uses two popular package managers, namely, Node Package Manager (NPM) and Yarn. When you install Node.js, NPM is installed by default. It lets you build or start your app, testing, format checking, and more. Yarn is used by Facebook and delivers exceptional performance, and is highly useful for developing small projects.

PHP offers many packages and extensions; hence, there’s a need for software to manage all of them. The package managers of PHP are PEAR, Composer, and PECL.

PEAR is the first package manager of PHP designed to let you install packages in a centralized repository. Also, PECL manages all the compiled extensions, and Composer lists software dependencies while making it easier to install them.

NPM is used the most among these package managers, but Yarn is also great if you want to develop small apps.

PHP vs Angular: Database Integration

Since Angular is a client-side web framework, it executes its code in a web browser instead of a database server or app server. As with JavaScript, Angular does not have direct access to a local computer. Therefore, you cannot integrate Angular with a database directly.

What you can do here is to build a RESTful API that can handle write or read requests using your database with a server-side programming language such as PHP, Ruby On Rails, etc. Next, use an Angular HTTP request to gain access to your software endpins. Plus, if you use the MEAN stack for your software development, you can use MongoDB.

However, PHP integrates seamlessly with several databases, including MariaDB and MySQL (one of the components of the LAMP stack that PHP belongs to).

In addition, you can find lots of PHP frameworks offering effortless database integration so you can search, sort, and filter data and present it before the user.

PHP vs Angular: Threading

Threading is the instructions given to a programming language. And a thread is a part of a computer program that can run independently. A single thread works as a sequential program with a beginning, execution, and ending. It’s not a complete program, but it runs within a particular piece of the program.

That said, multi-threaded programs can improve app performance significantly. That’s because they can run many tasks simultaneously inside a program.

Web browsers are an excellent example of multi-threaded applications. You can scroll through a page while the browser downloads an image, prints pages in the background as you download new pages, or plays music and animations concurrently.

Angular doesn’t have threads to organize your code and perform concurrent processes. Instead, it works on the client-side, in a browser that runs JavaScript.

So, what you can do here to achieve threading is using web workers. They are background threads created parallel to the main threads to perform heavy computations and help increase app performance. You can install web workers through Angular CLI and work with them.

Another alternative is to use JavaScript’s async attribute to defer parsing of non-critical code.

PHP is a multi-threaded programming language which means it is capable of processing multiple tasks in parallel. There’s also an object-oriented API called “pthreads” that can provide different tools required for multi-threading in PHP. Or, you can use parallel instead.

Thus, PHP apps can easily read, write, create, synchronize, and execute Threads, Threaded Objects, and Workers.

PHP vs Angular: Flexibility and Scalability

Modern applications must be capable of scaling up or down based on the scenario and meet customer demands. You may start with a smaller website or app, but you’ll always want to scale it to take your business to greater heights.

Scalability also lets your app adjust and work efficiently even if there’s high traffic, especially during festivities or peak seasons.

Both Angular and PHP are capable of scaling well and support your applications.

However, Angular exhibits higher scalability, so people use it extensively to develop enterprise-scale apps and websites. In addition, it’s written in TypeScript, which helps you quickly detect and remove common mistakes while making your code cleaner and better.

Angular scales easily due to its powerful architecture and robust CLI. You can also produce large-scale single-page apps with Angular with ease, simplifying unit tests and code reusability. In addition, angular offers modules and comes packed with core features you may need to scale your apps and add new functionality.

Although the recent versions are impressive, PHP offers less flexibility to emerging customer demands and growing trends. On the positive side, PHP supports lots of frameworks such as Laravel, Zend, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Symfony, and more.

So, if you are working on a small project, you can consider using PHP. It won’t cost you much in terms of investment; hence, a good choice for startups and small-scale organizations.

PHP vs Angular: Debugging

Debugging is one of the essential skills for web developers as much as programming. It’s the process of eliminating software bugs and making them function the way you desire based on the program.

Also, writing an error-free program is challenging. You may not control this, but you can indeed remove the errors in your program with the help of specific techniques and tools.

Angular 1 or AngularJS was terrible at debugging. But Angular 2+, especially Angular 9, introduced lots of improvements such as bundle size reduction using tree shaking, the Ivy compiler, and more.

As a result, Angular 9 enhanced debugging and how you interact with different components while developing. Besides, you can trigger change detection in Angular and reflect changes in the user interface, call methods, assess object values, and change them using an instance manually.

Not to mention, you have plenty of available tools and techniques for debugging, such as Angury, the debugger statement, ng probe, profiler, and editors and IDEs such as WebStorm and VS Code.

All these capabilities make Angular easy to debug.

On the other hand, PHP can be a bit tougher to debug, especially for a server-side programming language. Stopping the program execution, printing the values of your variables, and continuing might take long hours.

You may need to perform some additional steps while debugging a PHP program. But PHP also offers some debuggers such as ZendDebugger and Xdebug to make the debugging process less painful and compete faster. You also can integrate some PHP debuggers with CLI or IDE for debugging like VS Code.

PHP vs Angular: Security

As technology advances, so do cybersecurity issues. Hackers are inventing newer ways to exploit your website and app, including your customer details. They’re constantly looking to find vulnerabilities in your systems to inject their harmful intent and gain access to it.

Different types of security threats, including cross-site scripting (XSS), DDoS, phishing campaigns, malware attacks, and viruses, penetrate and hack your systems. As a result, companies suffer big time in terms of reputation, money, and compliance risks.

That’s is why you need to be extra cautious regarding your app or website security. And that starts with choosing a safer programming language (and also a secure hosting provider).

Angular uses TypeScript, which ensures a high level of security by supporting types such as interfaces, primitives, etc. It’s capable of catching and eliminating errors faster to keep your apps and sites secure.

By default, Angular treats every value untrusted. And when you insert a value into the DOM via property, style, attribute, interpolation, class binding, or from a template, Angular quickly sanitizes untrusted values to modify and make them safer to be inserted.

Angular also protects your applications from attacks and vulnerabilities like XSS attacks and HTTP vulnerabilities and offers ways to mitigate them. Furthermore, it enforces a Content Security Policy (CSP) and Trusted Types to prevent XSS attacks. You can also report vulnerabilities even in Angular by writing to them.

In comparison, PHP is just a base programming language —  and one of the most widely used ones. And like with almost all popular software, it’s unfortunately not the safest one either. Even after PHP 7’s arrival with drastic security improvements, you cannot wholly rely on PHP. A 2019 security report ranked PHP second among the most vulnerable server-side programming languages in the world.

It’s possible to come across security issues like SQL injection, XSS, source code revelation, session hijacking, and remote file inclusion in PHP programs.

In this case, Angular may seem more secure than PHP, but you’re better of comparing it with a PHP-based framework.

PHP vs Angular: Extensibility

The programming language you choose for your web development must be extensible so that you can integrate it with other technologies.

You don’t have to write everything from scratch when reusable code templates are available for you to include in your application. In addition, they’re great for adding specific features, such as a unified UI, including data entry, presenting data, and more. Thus, it saves your time and effort for developing standard features.

That said, Angular offers an outstanding level of extensibility to work with other technologies like libraries and extend the app functionality by adding reusable code.

There are plenty of Angular libraries available, including:

• Angular Material that offers advanced and flexible UI components
• NGX Bootstrap library that offers high adaptability and delivers impeccable performance on both desktop and mobile devices
• Prime NG with 70+ UI components
• NG Bootstrap with higher testing coverage
• Onsen UI for mobile and hybrid web apps

If you want to integrate a library into your app, install the NPM package and then import the given functionality where you want to use it. You can also use Angular CLI for many Angular libraries that are published.

Similarly, PHP is also extensible and supports lots of PHP libraries. Although coding in PHP is more straightforward, it can be tedious to write new code for adding every functionality.

Instead, save your development time and use some PHP libraries such as:

• pChart to create text data as a visual chart like pie charts, bar charts, etc.
• PHP CAPTCHA to create automated audio or video CAPTCHA and differentiate between bots and humans
• Dispatch to define URL rules for organizing your site or app better

You can also find more PHP libraries such as phpAES, PHP Thumbnailer, Mink, ImageWorkshop, Symfony Console Component, Faker (archived, but works), Monolog, and a lot more.

PHP vs Angular: Documentation

Good documentation makes implementing a programming language a bit easier while developing a website or application. It works like a guide you can always come back to.

Documentation is not only beneficial for beginners but also experienced developers. It contains complete details about the language, how to implement it, and other practical details you might need. In addition, it helps you remain updated with recent changes in the language.

Therefore, you’ll want to go for a programming language or any tool or framework with well-defined and readable documentation.

Angular’s documentation is remarkable. By visiting its official website, you can click on the menu to see how its documentation is written in a streamlined way, like a guide. To understand the docs, you just need to be familiar with JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.

The documentation consists of several topics about Angular with features, introduction to the framework, components, dependencies, templates, best practices, tools, tutorials, and more. What else would you need?

These docs would help you learn the Angular framework and implement it effectively for creating single-page apps, even for enterprises. In addition, the guides and tutorials have downloaded examples as well, which helps you accelerate your web or app development more.

PHP also has comprehensive documentation. As it has a vast community and user base, you can find many forums, discussion boards, courses, tutorials, and websites for PHP.

PHP documentation is available on its official site. Plus, its online manual is available in 10 languages: English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Russian, German, Turkish, Romanian, Brazilian Portuguese, and simplified Chinese.

The doc covers PHP in simple words along with its features, installation, and other parts. Developers can also comment on any page to clarify complex stuff with examples. It may help others understand PHP effectively, as people can view all the comments that remain forever once added.

Although it’s helpful, it also creates confusion about which comments are resolved in the updated PHP versions.

PHP vs Angular: Developer Community & Support

A supportive and active community of developers is always encouraging for developers, whether beginners or experienced. It lets you learn the language better while also acting as a healthy channel of networking with other developers in the industry, irrespective of your location on the world map.

So, when choosing a programming language, consider community and support as one of the factors. It will save you from getting stuck in the middle of your web development and preserve your efforts from going into vain.

The story of Angular’s community is a bit controversial and inconsistent. For example, in the 2018 Stack Overflow survey, Angular ranked second in the most used libraries, frameworks, and tools. But per the following year’s 2019 Stack Overflow survey, Angular slipped to the ninth rank.

Despite high performance and capabilities, Angular’s community seems to churn. Plus, you cannot see that much volume of forums, discussion panels, and websites to find information about Angular.

In contrast to this, PHP has a massive developer community being nurtured since 1995. Therefore, you can seek help from developers in case of doubts and build a healthy professional relationship with them.

PHP vs Angular: Market Demand

Angular is one of the most advanced and used web frameworks globally due to its exceptional offerings. According to this Stack Overflow survey from 2020, Angular ranked third among the most used web frameworks, which proves its high demand in the global market.

As it is used to develop mobile apps, websites, and native apps, its demand has skyrocketed. The biggies using Angular are PayPal, YouTube, Upwork, Netflix, and more.

This increased demand for Angular-based websites and applications has also increased jobs for skilled Angular developers. In the US, the average salary of an Angular developer is a bit more than $68,300 per year.

Coming to PHP, as already mentioned in this article, 79.2% of all websites use PHP as their server-side language. As of writing this, WordPress uses PHP and powers more than 41.4% of websites.

Apart from WordPress, PHP also powers Wikipedia, Joomla, Drupal, and more. The demand for PHP increased more after PHP 7 was introduced with its incredibly faster speed and impeccable additional improvements.

In the US, the average salary of a PHP developer gravitates around $60–80k per year.

PHP vs Angular: Which Is Better for Development?

Comparing PHP vs Angular aims to help you find a better fit for your web or application development. They both are different, and yes, comparing them sometimes feels like comparing an apple to a fruit salad. But then again, you can still add apples to your fruit salad.

Ultimately, you need to choose the best framework or programming language for your project. So, think about your website’s or app’s aims, usage, complexity, and whether it is a small project or an enterprise-level app.

Angular is suitable for developing enterprise-scale applications given its exceptional performance, flexibility, extensibility, scalability, and the use of TypeScript. As a result, you can build complex apps using Angular such as weather forecasting, video streaming, gaming, and more.

PHP, on the other hand, is a base programming language. Developers mainly use it for simple, small to medium-scale applications. But you can go as deep and wide with it as you want, even alongside Angular. Plus, if you’re going to develop ecommerce sites and CMS, it can be a good option. In addition, PHP is also suitable if you’re going to build learning management systems (LMS).

Hence, you can’t just choose concretely between PHP and Angular. It all depends on the requirements of your project. So select one among the two that can best satisfy all your application needs. In some cases, you may even find that they complement each other.

PHP vs Angular: Similarities

Despite several differences, Angular vs PHP has some points of similarities as well. These are:

• Both are open source. Hence, you’re free to use and modify based on your requirements.
• They are suitable for web and app development according to your project scope.
• Both have a large number of libraries to extend their functionalities.
• Angular and PHP are both high in demand (and hey, Kinsta’s hiring).
• Both of them have helpful package managers.
• Angular and PHP are both object-oriented, though one is a framework and the other is a language.
• Both are excellent in terms of speed and performance.

PHP vs Angular: Differences

Summary

It would be prudent to declare either PHP or Angular as the winner. They’re both efficient for building websites and applications with their excellent performance and features.

The Angular framework works excellent for building large-scale apps with complexity and need of scalability.

PHP is an old player, and it’s still very much in the game. It’s a good, low-cost option for you to develop a small business website, a portfolio site, or even an ecommerce store.

The scope and requirements of your project are the most significant factors you need to focus on. Both PHP and Angular have their pros and cons, sure, but it’s your project’s needs that should dictate which one works better for your use case.

Are you still confused about PHP vs Angular? Leave a comment, and we’ll try our best to help you out!