Author here, the main difference is that AngularStrap has been rewritten from the ground up to leverage ngAnimate that came with AngularJS 1.2+, so it's leaner and brings way more flexibility on widget view lifecycle. When ngAnimate gets better thanks to the work of the core team, AngularStrap gets better too! For instance v1.2.9 brought requestAnimationFrame support to ngAnimate, every AngularStrap directive got smoother thanks to it. Both project have no external dependency, only the Bootstrap CSS styles.