Onsen UI vs Xamarin Forms

Overview

Xamarin Forms

Stacks356

Followers278

Votes5

Onsen UI

Stacks40

Followers136

Votes11

GitHub Stars8.9K

Forks1.0K

Onsen UI vs Xamarin Forms: What are the differences?

Programming Language: Onsen UI is primarily based on HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, making it a popular choice for web developers looking to build mobile apps. In contrast, Xamarin Forms allows developers to use C# and XAML, offering a more familiar environment for those with experience in .NET development.
Performance: Xamarin Forms provides better performance and native user experience since it compiles to native code, resulting in faster rendering times and smoother animations compared to Onsen UI, which relies on a web view for rendering.
Theme Customization: Onsen UI offers a wide range of pre-built themes and components for quick app development, but customization options are limited compared to Xamarin Forms, which provides extensive theming capabilities and the ability to create custom UI controls.
Ecosystem and Community Support: Xamarin Forms has strong backing from Microsoft and a large community of developers, resulting in ample resources, documentation, and support. Onsen UI, although supported by a dedicated team, may have fewer resources and community-contributed plugins.
Platform-specific Features: Xamarin Forms allows developers to access platform-specific APIs and features easily through dependency services and custom renderers, enabling the integration of native functionality. Onsen UI, being a web-based framework, may face limitations in utilizing certain platform-specific features.
Development Environment: Xamarin Forms provides a comprehensive integrated development environment (IDE) with tools like Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio, enabling efficient debugging, testing, and deployment processes. Onsen UI development may require additional tools and plugins to achieve similar capabilities.

In Summary, Onsen UI and Xamarin Forms differ in programming language, performance, theme customization, ecosystem support, platform-specific features, and development environment, offering developers various options based on their requirements and familiarity with different technologies.

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Detailed Comparison

Xamarin Forms	Onsen UI
A mobile application framework for building user interfaces.It easily create native user interface layouts that can be shared across Android, iOS, and Windows Phone.	Onsen UI helps you develop both hybrid and web apps. If developing hybrid apps, you can use it with the Cordova / PhoneGap command line, or with Monaca tools (CLI, Monaca IDE - cloud-based IDE for Cordova, Localkit - desktop GUI).
-	Open source HTML5 hybrid app framework for PhoneGap & Cordova; JavaScript framework agnostic; Mobile-optimized HTML5, CSS and JavaScript with Web components; UI framework; Responsive layout; Material and Flat design; Comprehensive toolset (CLI, IDE, debugger, remote build etc.) provided as Monaca
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 8.9K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 1.0K
Stacks 356	Stacks 40
Followers 278	Followers 136
Votes 5	Votes 11
Pros & Cons
Pros 5 Native Development SDK with shared C# code-base	Pros 3 Works with any JavaScript framework 3 Allows for rapid prototyping 3 Hybrid mobile 2 Free

What are some alternatives to Xamarin Forms, Onsen UI?

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.

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 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 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.

Related Comparisons

Onsen UI vs Xamarin Forms: What are the differences?

Programming Language: Onsen UI is primarily based on HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, making it a popular choice for web developers looking to build mobile apps. In contrast, Xamarin Forms allows developers to use C# and XAML, offering a more familiar environment for those with experience in .NET development.
Performance: Xamarin Forms provides better performance and native user experience since it compiles to native code, resulting in faster rendering times and smoother animations compared to Onsen UI, which relies on a web view for rendering.
Theme Customization: Onsen UI offers a wide range of pre-built themes and components for quick app development, but customization options are limited compared to Xamarin Forms, which provides extensive theming capabilities and the ability to create custom UI controls.
Ecosystem and Community Support: Xamarin Forms has strong backing from Microsoft and a large community of developers, resulting in ample resources, documentation, and support. Onsen UI, although supported by a dedicated team, may have fewer resources and community-contributed plugins.
Platform-specific Features: Xamarin Forms allows developers to access platform-specific APIs and features easily through dependency services and custom renderers, enabling the integration of native functionality. Onsen UI, being a web-based framework, may face limitations in utilizing certain platform-specific features.
Development Environment: Xamarin Forms provides a comprehensive integrated development environment (IDE) with tools like Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio, enabling efficient debugging, testing, and deployment processes. Onsen UI development may require additional tools and plugins to achieve similar capabilities.

Onsen UI vs Xamarin Forms

Overview