Overview

Xamarin

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.5K

Votes785

NativeScript

Stacks533

Followers1.1K

Votes516

GitHub Stars25.3K

Forks1.7K

NativeScript vs Xamarin: What are the differences?

# Introduction
When choosing a cross-platform mobile development framework, NativeScript and Xamarin are two popular options. Understanding their key differences can help developers make an informed decision on which one to use for their projects.

1. **Language and Technology Stack**: NativeScript uses JavaScript, TypeScript, and Angular to develop mobile applications, while Xamarin uses C# and .NET. This difference in languages and technology stack can influence a developer's preference based on their familiarity and expertise in a particular language.
   
2. **UI Components**: NativeScript offers native UI components that render directly to the native platform, resulting in faster performance. In contrast, Xamarin relies on a shared UI framework that may cause a slight lag in performance compared to NativeScript.

3. **Tooling and Ecosystem**: Xamarin provides a robust ecosystem with Visual Studio and Xamarin.Forms, allowing developers to build cross-platform applications efficiently. On the other hand, NativeScript offers multiple plugins for seamless integration with various libraries and tools, enhancing the development experience.

4. **Performance and Compilation**: NativeScript compiles the JavaScript code to native code at runtime, resulting in slower startup times compared to Xamarin, which compiles the code to native binary, leading to faster execution. Developers need to consider the trade-off between startup time and execution speed when choosing between the two frameworks.

5. **Community Support and Documentation**: Xamarin, backed by Microsoft, has a strong community support system and extensive documentation to address developers' queries and concerns. NativeScript, although growing rapidly, may have fewer resources and community-driven solutions compared to Xamarin.

6. **Cost and Licensing**: While both frameworks offer free community editions, Xamarin requires a paid license for businesses with revenue exceeding a certain threshold. In contrast, NativeScript is open source and free to use, making it a cost-effective option for developers and businesses.

# Summary
In Summary, the key differences between NativeScript and Xamarin lie in their language and technology stack, UI components, tooling and ecosystem, performance and compilation, community support and documentation, as well as cost and licensing, ultimately influencing developers' choice for cross-platform mobile development.

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Advice on Xamarin, NativeScript

Gabor

CTO at momento.

Aug 23, 2021

Decided

As a startup, we need the maximum flexibility and the ability to reach our customers in a more suitable way. So a hybrid application approach is the best because it allows you to develop a cross-platform application in a unique codebase. The choice behind Ionic is Angular, I think that angular is the best framework to develop a complex application that needs a lot of service interaction, its modularity forces you (the developer) to write the code in the correct way, so it can be maintainable and reusable.

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Comments

Bhupendra

Web Developer at Ecombooks

Oct 13, 2022

Needs adviceon

React Native

Flutter

Xamarin

I want to learn cross-platform application frameworks like React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, or Ionic, and I'm a web developer. I can learn other programming languages as well. But I'm confused about what to learn, which framework is best, and which framework will last long as the application grows further into complexity.

727k views727k

Comments

Lucas

Jan 6, 2023

Needs adviceon

iOS

Visual Studio Code

TypeScript

Hello,

We're just brainstorming for the moment and we have a few questions.

We have an idea for an app that we want to develop, here are the prerequisites:

cross-platform (iOS, Android, and website);
as easy to maintain as possible / well documented / widely used;
Visual Studio Code and Copilot compatible;
Text to speech;
Speech recognition;
Running in background (screen off with TTS and speech recognition);
could be using TypeScript;
Monetized through ad and in-App payment for premium version;
Display on lock screen (Android only I guess)

So what would you recommend?

I've been trying to review the options available, and I've considered:

Thanks in advance for your help, and I'm open to any comments.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Xamarin	NativeScript
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 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.
Cross-platform development- Thinking about supporting iOS, Android, Mac and Windows? Xamarin allows you to write it all in C#.;Reuse existing code- Use your favorite .NET libraries in Xamarin apps. Easily use third-party native libraries and frameworks.; Discover as you type- Explore APIs as you type with code autocompletion.;Visual Studio or Xamarin Studio- Create, build, debug, and deploy apps in Visual Studio. Or use Xamarin Studio, a fully-featured IDE that is built for mobile app development.;Native UI, Native Performance- Xamarin delivers high performance compiled code with full access to all the native APIs so you can create native apps with device-specific experiences.; Point and Click UI Design- Xamarin provides a world class Android UI designer. Use Apple Xcode UI designer to create interfaces and Storyboards that automatically sync with your Xamarin.iOS project.	100% Access to Native Platform API;NativeScript is free of charge as an open source project;Code with JavaScript. Style with CSS;Cross-platform UI abstractions;Shared business logic and data models
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 25.3K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 1.7K
Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 533
Followers 1.5K	Followers 1.1K
Votes 785	Votes 516
Pros & Cons
Pros 121 Power of c# on mobile devices 81 Native performance 79 Native apps with native ui controls 73 No javascript - truely compiled code 67 Sharing more than 90% of code over all platforms Cons 9 Build times 5 Visual Studio 4 Price 3 Complexity 3 Scalability	Pros 75 Access to the entire native api 47 Support for native ios and android libraries 46 Support for javascript libraries 46 Angular 2.0 support 44 Native ux and performance Cons 5 Lack of promotion 1 Slower Performance compared to competitors

What are some alternatives to Xamarin, NativeScript?

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.

Flutter

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

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.

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

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.

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 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

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.

Vue Native

Vue Native is a mobile framework to build truly native mobile app using Vue.js. Its is designed to connect React Native and Vue.js. Vue Native is a wrapper around React Native APIs, which allows you to use Vue.js and compose rich mobile User Interface.

Shoutem UI

Shoutem UI is a set of styleable components that enables you to build beautiful React Native applications for iOS and Android. All of our components are built to be both composable and customizable.