State management is a critical aspect of modern web applications. In the Angular ecosystem, reactivity has long been powered by observables (RxJS), a powerful but sometimes complex paradigm. Angular’s recent introduction of signals provides a new, intuitive reactivity model to simplify UI state handling. Meanwhile, frameworks like React are exploring server components that push some state management to the server side.
This article compares these approaches: observables, signals, and server components, and when to use each in modern development.