Stop treating Signals and NgRx like rival factions. If your Angular app feels like a house of cards prone to memory leaks, race conditions, and UI stutters it’s likely because you’re forcing a single tool to do a job it wasn't built for. In the modern Angular ecosystem, the "winner-takes-all" mentality is dead. The most resilient apps don't choose between Signals and NgRx; they wire them together.

The Architecture of a Meltdown

We’ve all seen the "Six-Month Slump." A project starts clean, but as it scales into an enterprise dashboard, the complexity explodes.

•Pure RxJS becomes a web of combineLatest and switchMap that no one dares touch.
• Legacy NgRx feels like writing a novel just to update a single toggle.
• Raw Signals (used alone) quickly turn into "Signal Spaghetti," where global business logic is scattered across disconnected services, making debugging a nightmare.

When these patterns fail, they fail loudly usually at 2 a.m. during a high-stakes deployment.

The Modern Blueprint: Hybrid Stability

The secret to a "glitch-free" UI is knowing where to draw the line. If you’re building in 2026, the NgRx SignalStore is your middle ground. It offers the architectural rigor of Redux with the developer experience of Signals.

1. The "Vault" (NgRx SignalStore)

Keep your Global Logic here. This is the source of truth for API caching, pessimistic updates, and complex data transformations. It’s predictable, testable, and centralized.

2. The "View" (Signals)

Use Signals for Local Reactivity. Pull data from the NgRx vault and map it directly to your components. Signals handle the DOM updates with surgical precision, eliminating the "Zone.js overhead" and the mental tax of manual subscription management.

3. The "Engine" (RxJS)

Don't throw away your Observables. RxJS remains the gold standard for Asynchronous Streams. Use it for WebSockets, debounced searches, and retry logic.

The Rule of Thumb: Use RxJS to fetch the data, NgRx to store the data, and Signals to display the data.

Case Study: The $40K-an-Hour "Freeze"

I recently consulted for a logistics giant whose warehouse dashboard was cratering under heavy load. A high-frequency WebSocket was flooding their legacy NgRx store with real-time truck coordinates.

Because they were using heavy RxJS pipes in their "Smart Components," every single WebSocket tick forced a massive re-calculation. CPU usage on warehouse tablets hit 98%, the UI locked up, and the client was losing roughly $40K per hour in stalled shipments.

The Fix:

We migrated the state to NgRx SignalStore and mapped the real-time coordinates to localized Signals in the UI.

○ Before: The entire component tree re-evaluated on every update.
○ After: Only the specific coordinate labels on the map updated.
○ Result: CPU usage dropped to 12%. The freezing stopped instantly.

The 2026 Decision Matrix