Picking the right framework is key to growing your app without headaches. The wrong choice can lead to messy code, higher costs, and constant rework. Angular is built to handle growth, making it easier to go from a small project to a large, scalable product. If you want to avoid common scaling problems, this article is for you. One of the major decisions a startup or company has to make is deciding which set of technologies to use to build an app. There are many ways to approach this, and one of the biggest choices is selecting the right framework.
Hi! My name is Tom Smykowski, and I’m a senior software engineer. Throughout my career, I’ve worked on both startups and large-scale enterprise applications serving millions of users and developed by hundreds of frontend engineers. This experience has given me a unique perspective on what works — and what doesn’t — when it comes to building scalable applications.
Currently, we have several options, such as frameworks based on the React library, like Next.js; Vue and its ecosystem; and Angular, among others.
Today, I’ll focus on what makes Angular great if you want to scale your app. By scaling, I mean preparing an app in a way that allows it to smoothly transition from an MVP to a fully-fledged product and from a small team of 2–3 frontend developers to a large-scale operation with 30–50 frontend developers spread across multiple squads, developing and maintaining the app at scale.
If your service or product is based on digital services, this is an inevitable future. As your business grows, your app must keep up with market demand and serve both customer and user needs. Early on, it’s crucial to set up your app to be flexible enough to accommodate pivots on the path to unicorn status — without hitting the dead end of skyrocketing legacy development costs.
Angular is a great choice for building scalable apps, and today, I’ll share some practical insights into why.
1. If You Want Your Business to Grow, Choose a Framework That Scales With It
When evaluating tools for building an application, we can categorize them based on their complexity. For example, you can write fully functional apps using only JavaScript, without any framework or library. However, this means you must handle everything that frameworks and libraries typically provide. As a result, the complexity of such an application will be the highest.
Developers will need to solve problems that have already been addressed by existing tools, forcing them to work at a low level rather than focusing on business logic and user experience. This makes development more expensive and error-prone. On the positive side, developers will have full control over every aspect of the application.
On the other end of the spectrum, you can choose tools with very low complexity, such as no-code platforms. This approach can reduce development costs because no-code tools enable app creation with little to no coding. However, the trade-off is a lack of flexibility — if a tool doesn’t support a feature, you may simply be unable to implement it. This inherent limitation makes low-complexity tools unsuitable for scalable, evolving applications.
Frameworks and Libraries on the Complexity Scale
Libraries and frameworks also fit on this complexity scale, and choosing the right one depends on the level of complexity your project requires.
React is a library, meaning it provides a low-level solution for building UI components. To create a framework-like structure with React, you either need to use Next.js alongside additional libraries or manually assemble your own set of tools. Each React-based setup is unique — it varies from company to company and team to team. The flexibility of this approach allows switching out tools while keeping the core intact, but it also comes with a downside: developers must manage low-level concerns, ensuring that all loosely coupled dependencies work together.
Angular, on the other hand, is a framework, meaning it abstracts away low-level concerns so developers can work at a higher level of abstraction. In the past, Angular had significant complexity due to over-engineered modules, cumbersome reactivity, and a tedious templating model. However, recent improvements — such as standalone components, new template authoring, and signals — have repositioned Angular as a low-operational-complexity tool with a low entry barrier.
Why Angular Is Better for Scaling
Learning Angular is now easier than mastering the various React-based frameworks. Since Angular follows a standardized approach, developers can seamlessly switch between different Angular projects and sections of an app while maintaining productivity.
React works well for small, simple applications and MVPs, where flexibility is an advantage. However, as an app scales, the challenges of React’s low-level approach start to dominate, leading to higher development costs.
Angular, by contrast, supports MVP development while also providing the tools needed to pivot and scale without requiring expensive architectural overhauls. This makes Angular a better choice for building scalable applications from the start.
2. Scaling From One Developer to One Hundred
For scalable apps, it’s inevitable that the businesses offering them will grow. You can start a SaaS service to manage transportation by using AI to write a simple rail transport and scheduling application. If you gain expertise in this process and find a niche, your MVP app can successfully enter the market.
What many technical founders miss is that to scale the business further, they’ll need to expand the range of problems they solve for their customers. For example, people transporting cargo likely also use ship transportation and may need solutions for packaging and sorting. As these needs grow, companies using your app will want to integrate as many of their processes as possible into it to streamline operations. This also means handling users with different roles and permissions.
Suddenly, you may find yourself buried under customer requests, inevitably leading to hiring more developers and organizing their work to handle all business-critical features efficiently.
Organizing Teams and Code for Scalability
A great way to structure both development teams and code is around specific types of operations, for example:
- Ship Operations Team
- Cargo Control Team
- Rail Operations Team
- Packing & Sorting Team
Each of these teams is responsible for a specific vertical of the operation and oversees the development of app features related to that part of the business. In practice, each subsystem can exist within the application under different menu sections.
From a technical perspective, this means that feature elements, such as components, data handling, and helper utilities, should be grouped together in the codebase. This clear separation of ownership ensures maintainability and scalability.
Both React and Angular allow structuring feature files into functional directories. However, Angular previously relied on ngModules to organize features, a parallel structure that is now being phased out in favor of standalone components. This shift simplifies code reorganization, making it easier to reflect the organizational structure of a company within the codebase.
Additionally, Angular’s built-in lazy loading, improved tree shaking in the latest versions, and signal-based performance optimizations now make Angular apps feel significantly faster and more responsive, even on slow internet connections. This is a major improvement compared to the older days of Angular.
3. Performance Shouldn’t Sacrifice User Experience
In life, as in programming, when you try to handle too many things at once, none of them is done properly. React is a great example of this. It offers low-level development, which can enable edge performance. However, when we look at React apps in practice, we see some drawbacks.
When developers have to manage low-level concerns, they have less time to focus on the user experience. Conversely, when they prioritize user experience, they have less time for performance optimizations. The result? React apps that are either difficult to use due to UI quirks, slow, or — most often — both.
Key Business Questions When Scaling
From a business perspective, the most important questions are:
- Can we provide this feature?
- How much will it cost?
- When will it be ready?
- Will it work properly?
In reality, businesses operate under budget and time constraints, which means that feature development must make sense from a business perspective. No matter what technology stack you choose, to stay competitive, you need to:
- Deliver features quickly
- Keep development costs low
- Ensure features work properly
- The Trade-Offs in Development
These constraints often force developers to make sacrifices, such as:
- Limiting the scope of a feature
- Delaying accessibility and performance improvements
- Leaving UI quirks for future fixes
- Ultimately, you want to choose a toolset that minimizes risks in all these areas, allowing you to deliver features on time and within budget.
How Angular Reduces Development Risks
A great example of Angular’s approach to reducing complexity is memory leak prevention. A memory leak occurs when an app fails to release memory after objects are no longer needed, gradually slowing down performance until the app becomes unusable or crashes.
With Signals, Angular now automatically unsubscribes from Observables, eliminating a common source of memory leaks. Previously, developers had to manually manage subscriptions, which was often overlooked. The less developers need to worry about these low-level concerns, the more time they have to focus on delivering features, which is their core job.
Angular, as a framework, is designed to handle these complexities so that developers can concentrate on building great products, not fighting unnecessary technical debt.
Summary
Choosing the right framework is crucial for long-term growth. While React offers flexibility, it requires managing low-level complexities that can slow development as teams scale. Angular, on the other hand, standardizes architecture, making it easier for developers to collaborate and maintain large applications.
With built-in performance optimizations, automatic memory management, and structured scalability, Angular reduces development risks while allowing businesses to deliver features quickly and efficiently. If you’re building for scale, Angular provides the stability and flexibility needed to grow without technical debt slowing you down.
Scaling your app shouldn’t mean chaos, rising costs, or endless refactoring. Want to build an Angular app that scales smoothly from startup to enterprise? Grab my free checklist now, and ensure your app is built for growth, efficiency, and long-term success!
