I'm trying to make a single page application, thinking to use angular but I've heard some pretty bad things about it, is it that bad? Are there any good alternatives to it?

Meteor is another alternative same as React.

React is just VM of MVC.

Angular is good. Must develop the angular way. If you don't you'll have problems. That's why you hear bad things. It's very opinionated.

@champion01 okay thanks.

vuejs is the most easy and complete alternative in the world, I think. Riotjs too.

Its not as shiny and new as it was in 2012 but I still like Backbone.js for what its worth... Really flexible, but it doesn't do a lot of things you might expect (e.g. garbage collecting). But not much "magic" under the hood, which I always find to be a good thing in the long run.

@champion01 Agreed. But do be prepared, when you have dependency issues, to have really vague error messages...

Angular2.0 is still more popular then react, but I think this will change soon. react gained so much popularity since they released it.