AngularJS to Angular Migration: 2 Official Tools Explained

By Pamela Orange

Updated Oct 2, 2026Published Dec 11, 20209 min read

Note (October 2026): ngMigration Assistant and ngMigration Forum were released by the Angular team in August 2018, not shortly before this article was published, and Google ended all AngularJS support in January 2022. The article has been updated with current facts.

The two tools the Angular team released in August 2018 for AngularJS-to-Angular migrations are ngMigration Assistant, a command-line analyzer (npm package ngma) that scans an AngularJS app and recommends a migration path, and ngMigration Forum, a GitHub-hosted collection of migration guides and tools. The official ngUpgrade library handles the incremental migration itself.

Hello developers community!

Migrating from AngularJS to Angular has been a priority for many teams, especially since Google ended AngularJS support in January 2022. Before the migration from AngularJS, the developer must carefully plan the entire process, foresee potential problems, and learn new post-migration working conventions.

In this article which is called ‘2 New Tools To Help With AngularJS To Angular Migrations’, you will read why such a process in development is needed and what technologies exist for its implementation. Let’s start from the beginning!

What are the reasons for the migration process from AngularJS to Angular?

Experienced developers believe that Angular is better than AngularJS in everything – it is faster, easier, more convenient, it has fewer bugs (for example, template typing helps to fight them).

Such a tendency was noticed while working with Angular 2, but then many experts did not advise to migrate because there was a fear that suddenly Google would again decide to turn everything upside down with the next version, without backward compatibility.

This was especially true for large projects and such a transition to the essence of a new framework requires serious resources, and it was not at all desirable to do it every two years. Another reason for the popularity of migration to Angular is the actualization of the technologies that are used in the development of the project.

Sooner or later, you will have to switch from AngularJS to Angular anyway, but the earlier you do it, the cheaper and more convenient the migration will be (the amount of code grows all the time, and you will get the benefits of the new technology earlier). At last, the third critical reason: developers.

AngularJS is a finished framework: Google stopped fixing its security, browser-compatibility and jQuery issues after January 1, 2022, and its final release, version 1.8.3, came out on April 7, 2022. Talented developers are always interested in new technologies, because they are simply not interested in creating successful projects with an outdated framework.

Angular skills also remain useful in the job market, because Angular is still actively developed: Angular 22 was released on June 3, 2026.

The team responsible for the development of Angular did not remain indifferent to the migration issue. In August 2018, to help developers interested in such a process, the team released two tools – ngMigration Assistant and ngMigration Forum.

The tools let you know which is the right migration from AngularJS to Angular, how to simplify the development process as much as possible and avoid mistakes.

• The first tool we’ll look at is ngMigration Assistant. It is used on the command line and parses any AngularJS application, regardless of size, and recommends the best migration path. To help the developer, statistics from the ngMigration Assistant are offered that tell about the complexity, size, content and layout of the future application. Based on this information, the program provides a list of clear rules to simplify the transition from AngularJS to Angular, given the estimate and complexity of the code. After a global install (npm install -g ngma), running ngma followed by the app’s directory makes the tool analyze the code and print its recommendations. First, the tool shows the statistics of the available data, and then – the stages of preparation for the migration to Angular.
• The next helper in the migration process from the Angular team is the ngMigration Forum. The ngMigration Forum, launched in 2018 as a GitHub wiki whose repository is now archived (read-only), collects information on migration paths and tools that ensure the switching from AngularJS to Angular, that means that the ngMigration Forum is a kind of place for exchanging experiences, solving problems and questions for framework experts. By reading this Forum, you can get information about many migration methods, many of which can be combined when switching from one framework to another. For each of the examples, Forum specialists provide an example, useful information and tools for a high-quality migration to Angular. After all, even novice developers will be able to feel as experienced as Forum experts and get advice. It’s always nice when there is someone to turn to about a development issue that often arises in the process. It is the place to bring all developers’ considerations and experiences together, to share valuable information and great tools with others.

Conclusion

I hope that after reading the article ‘2 New Tools To Help With AngularJS To Angular Migration, all issues about the migration process became clear, and the information was interesting and useful.

If you are developing a large project on AngularJS and are thinking about switching to Angular, then refer to these two tools that will help you solve this migration task. Happy coding and successful switching!

AngularJS vs. Angular: What Is the Difference?

AngularJS is the name for all 1.x versions of the framework, first released by Google on October 20, 2010. Angular (version 2 and later) is an incompatible, TypeScript-based rewrite, which is why moving between them is a migration rather than a simple version upgrade.

AngularJS code is organized around controllers, scopes and directives, while Angular is built around components written as TypeScript classes, so most AngularJS code has to be rewritten or wrapped before it can run in Angular.

AngularJS End of Support: Key Dates

According to the AngularJS documentation, the code stays available on GitHub, npm and Bower, and the GitHub repository is archived, so no new issues or pull requests can be filed. The npm package for AngularJS is marked as deprecated. For teams that cannot migrate yet, the AngularJS documentation lists HeroDevs as a commercial extended-support option.

Which Angular Version Should You Migrate To?

As of October 2026, the Angular release documentation lists three supported major versions:

Starting with Angular 22, the Angular team moved to one major release every 12 months; earlier versions followed a 6-month cycle. Each major version is supported for 24 months: 12 months of active updates followed by 12 months of long-term support with critical and security fixes only. A new migration should target the current active version.

How ngMigration Assistant Works

ngMigration Assistant is an MIT-licensed command-line utility written by Elana Olson of Google’s Angular team. According to its GitHub README, it is installed globally with npm install -g ngma or yarn global add ngma and run as ngma <your_angularjs_app>; without an argument it scans the current working directory.

• What it measures: source lines of code, complexity, anti-patterns, the AngularJS version in use and the preparation the app needs.
• What it ignores: files matched by the project’s .gitignore, plus default ignore patterns.
• How it decides: it checks whether the app is AngularJS, Angular or already hybrid, whether its code size is under a rewrite threshold, and whether it meets the requirements for ngUpgrade.
• What it outputs: a recommended migration path and a preparation report that lists the files to change and the changes to make.

The latest npm version of ngma is 1.0.6, published on August 15, 2018, so the tool has not been updated for current Angular versions. Its analysis of an AngularJS codebase is still useful as a starting checklist, but its advice on the Angular side should be checked against the current Angular documentation.

What ngUpgrade Does

ngUpgrade (the @angular/upgrade package) is the official Angular library for incremental migration. It lets AngularJS and Angular code run in the same “hybrid” application, so a large app can be migrated piece by piece without stopping feature work.

• UpgradeModule bootstraps and manages a hybrid application and bridges the two change-detection systems.
• downgradeComponent() makes an Angular component usable inside AngularJS templates.
• UpgradeComponent wraps an AngularJS component so it can be used inside Angular.
• downgradeInjectable() exposes an Angular service to AngularJS code.

The Angular upgrade guide states that ngUpgrade became feature complete with the end of AngularJS and promised security and bug fixes until at least December 31, 2023. The package is still published alongside Angular: version 22.2.1 appeared on npm on September 30, 2026.

How to Prepare an AngularJS App for Migration

The official Angular upgrade guide recommends preparing the AngularJS code before the upgrade itself begins:

1. Run ngMigration Assistant to get a size and complexity baseline and a list of anti-patterns to fix.
2. Follow the AngularJS style guide, especially the “Rule of 1”: one component, controller, service or filter per file.
3. Use a module loader such as Webpack so the code can use TypeScript or ES2015 imports and exports.
4. Move to TypeScript: install the TypeScript compiler and rename files from .js to .ts, since TypeScript is a superset of ECMAScript 2015.
5. Convert to component directives, ideally with the component API introduced in AngularJS 1.5, instead of ng-controller, ng-include and scope inheritance.
6. Switch to manual bootstrapping by replacing the ng-app directive with a call to angular.bootstrap.
7. Install @angular/upgrade, bootstrap a hybrid app with UpgradeModule, then port components and services one at a time until AngularJS can be removed.

Testing after each ported component reduces risk; the web application testing guide covers the main test types. To check what changed in configuration files during the move, a JSON compare tool can diff two versions of package.json or tsconfig.json.

Migration Tools Compared

Some teams use the migration as a chance to compare frameworks; see why teams use React.js on web development projects, the top VueJS developer tools and broader web development trends.

Written byPamela Orange

Pamela Orange has published 162 articles on Justwebworld since 2020, mostly covering Tech, Business and Digital.

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