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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Cross Platform Desktop Development
  5. Flutter vs OpenFL

Flutter vs OpenFL

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

OpenFL
OpenFL
Stacks11
Followers15
Votes0
GitHub Stars2.1K
Forks475
Flutter
Flutter
Stacks17.7K
Followers16.8K
Votes1.2K
GitHub Stars173.7K
Forks29.4K

Flutter vs OpenFL: What are the differences?

Flutter: Cross-platform mobile framework from Google. Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android; OpenFL: *Build games and applications for almost every platform imaginable *. It enables creative expression for the desktop, mobile and web. Enterprise applications and best-selling games are made with it, publishing native, Flash and HTML5 applications using one seamless toolset.

Flutter can be classified as a tool in the "Cross-Platform Mobile Development" category, while OpenFL is grouped under "Cross-Platform Desktop Development".

Some of the features offered by Flutter are:

  • Fast development - Flutter's "hot reload" helps you quickly and easily experiment, build UIs, add features, and fix bug faster. Experience sub-second reload times, without losing state, on emulators, simulators, and hardware for iOS and Android.
  • Expressive UIs - Delight your users with Flutter's built-in beautiful Material Design and Cupertino (iOS-flavor) widgets, rich motion APIs, smooth natural scrolling, and platform awareness.
  • Access native features and SDKs - Make your app come to life with platform APIs, 3rd party SDKs, and native code. Flutter lets you reuse your existing Java, Swift, and ObjC code, and access native features and SDKs on iOS and Android.

On the other hand, OpenFL provides the following key features:

  • Vector Graphics
  • Seamless support for image, canvas and typed array pixel stores
  • Text Support

Flutter and OpenFL are both open source tools. Flutter with 76K GitHub stars and 9.4K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than OpenFL with 1.42K GitHub stars and 331 GitHub forks.

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Advice on OpenFL, Flutter

Nick
Nick

CTO at Pickio

Jun 2, 2020

Decided

We built the first version of our app with RN and it turned out a mess in a while. A lot of bugs along with poor performance out of the box for a fairly large app. Many things, that native platform has, cannot be done with existing solutions for RN. For instance, large titles on iOS are not fully implemented in any of existing navigations libraries. Also there's painfully slow JSON bridge and many other small, yet annoying things. On the other hand Flutter became a really powerful and easy-to-use tool. A bit of a learning curve, of course, because of Dart, but it worth learning. Flutter offers TONS of built-in features, no JSON-bridge, AOT compilation for iOS.

491k views491k
Comments
Anonymous
Anonymous

CEO at ME!

Jun 7, 2020

Decided

While with Ionic it is possible to make mobile applications with only web technologies, Flutter is more performant and is easy to use if you are willing to learn Dart, which is a fun language. Plus, it has awesome documentation and, while its ecosystem isn't near as big as JavaScript's is, it has a good package manager called Pub and its packages are generally high quality.

403k views403k
Comments
Thuan
Thuan

FE Lead at SOLID ENGINEER

Jun 16, 2020

Decided
  • Javascripts is the most populated language in the world.
  • Easy to learn & deployed production
  • Fast development
  • Strong community
  • Completed Documents
  • Native performance with lower RAM used.
  • Easy to handle native issues by using native code like Java / Objective C
  • Powered by Facebook.
666k views666k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

OpenFL
OpenFL
Flutter
Flutter

It enables creative expression for the desktop, mobile and web. Enterprise applications and best-selling games are made with it, publishing native, Flash and HTML5 applications using one seamless toolset.

Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.

Vector Graphics; Seamless support for image, canvas and typed array pixel stores;Text Support;Sound Support; Batched tile rendering; Video rendering; Asset management; MovieClip animations
Fast development - Flutter's "hot reload" helps you quickly and easily experiment, build UIs, add features, and fix bug faster. Experience sub-second reload times, without losing state, on emulators, simulators, and hardware for iOS and Android.;Expressive UIs - Delight your users with Flutter's built-in beautiful Material Design and Cupertino (iOS-flavor) widgets, rich motion APIs, smooth natural scrolling, and platform awareness.;Access native features and SDKs - Make your app come to life with platform APIs, 3rd party SDKs, and native code. Flutter lets you reuse your existing Java, Swift, and ObjC code, and access native features and SDKs on iOS and Android.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
2.1K
GitHub Stars
173.7K
GitHub Forks
475
GitHub Forks
29.4K
Stacks
11
Stacks
17.7K
Followers
15
Followers
16.8K
Votes
0
Votes
1.2K
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 149
    Hot Reload
  • 126
    Cross platform
  • 107
    Performance
  • 90
    Backed by Google
  • 74
    Compiled into Native Code
Cons
  • 29
    Need to learn Dart
  • 11
    Lack of community support
  • 10
    No 3D Graphics Engine Support
  • 8
    Graphics programming
  • 6
    Lack of friendly documentation
Integrations
TypeScript
TypeScript
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code
Linux
Linux
JavaScript
JavaScript
ES6
ES6
IntelliJ IDEA
IntelliJ IDEA
Sublime Text
Sublime Text
macOS
macOS
Windows
Windows
Haxe
Haxe
Android SDK
Android SDK
Firebase
Firebase
Dart
Dart

What are some alternatives to OpenFL, Flutter?

Ionic

Ionic

Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript.

React Native

React Native

React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.

Xamarin

Xamarin

Xamarin’s Mono-based products enable .NET developers to use their existing code, libraries and tools (including Visual Studio*), as well as skills in .NET and the C# programming language, to create mobile applications for the industry’s most widely-used mobile devices, including Android-based smartphones and tablets, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

NativeScript

NativeScript

NativeScript enables developers to build native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Universal while sharing the application code across the platforms. When building the application UI, developers use our libraries, which abstract the differences between the native platforms.

Apache Cordova

Apache Cordova

Apache Cordova is a set of device APIs that allow a mobile app developer to access native device function such as the camera or accelerometer from JavaScript. Combined with a UI framework such as jQuery Mobile or Dojo Mobile or Sencha Touch, this allows a smartphone app to be developed with just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Framework7

Framework7

It is a free and open source mobile HTML framework to develop hybrid mobile apps or web apps with iOS native look and feel. All you need to make it work is a simple HTML layout and attached framework's CSS and JS files.

Electron

Electron

With Electron, creating a desktop application for your company or idea is easy. Initially developed for GitHub's Atom editor, Electron has since been used to create applications by companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Slack, and Docker. The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on io.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor.

Qt

Qt

Qt, a leading cross-platform application and UI framework. With Qt, you can develop applications once and deploy to leading desktop, embedded & mobile targets.

PhoneGap

PhoneGap

PhoneGap is a web platform that exposes native mobile device apis and data to JavaScript. PhoneGap is a distribution of Apache Cordova. PhoneGap allows you to use standard web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript for cross-platform development, avoiding each mobile platforms' native development language. Applications execute within wrappers targeted to each platform, and rely on standards-compliant API bindings to access each device's sensors, data, and network status.

Expo

Expo

It is a framework and a platform for universal React applications. It is a set of tools and services built around React Native and native platforms that help you develop, build, deploy, and quickly iterate on iOS, Android, and web apps.

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