AngularJS requires intermediary models and an orchestration of $watches within $digest cycles. AngularJS has great code re-use if you follow a molecular file archie pattern, and try to utilize message passing for a fuller OOP buildout of your application's communication ecosystem. AngularJS debugging *is* nasty, but if you throw Protractor End-to-End middleware in, you can have many semantic/module defects rendered into your commandline console via REPL. RequireJS works nicely with AngularJS, though some configuration and path munging is essential to ensure libraries are loaded in an orderly fashion. React's server-side templating system can be used to bootstrap AngularJS's $compile engine as middleware decorator.

"Both frameworks are awesome, and it's hard to decide which to use. Angular is very opinionated, which can be great if it fits your development scenario. React gives you freedom and simplicity, but lacks the declarative power of Angular. However, when using react-templates, you'll get to use a lot of the stuff we love about Angular, but without the messy stuff. For people that are strong in vanillajs, have complex projects, care about file packaging or want to use a framework in conjunction with other libraries, we believe that React + react-templates is a winning solution."

@see www.airpair.com/angularjs/posts/angular-vs-react-the-tie-breaker