Appcelerator vs Ionic: What are the differences?
What is Appcelerator? Build network-connected mobile applications across native platforms and the web. Appcelerator is the first mobile platform to combine the flexibility of open source development technologies with the power of cloud services.
What is Ionic? A beautiful front-end framework for developing cross-platform apps with web technologies like Angular and React. 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.
Appcelerator and Ionic are primarily classified as "Mobile Backend" and "Cross-Platform Mobile Development" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Appcelerator are:
- Library of over 20 pre-built common services that are both proven and robust, to reduce integration time and risk, services such as push notification, status updates, photo storage, and social integration, or create your own custom cloud services.
- Client-side APIs for any development platform (e.g. Titanium, iOS SDK, Android SDK)
- Extensibility enabling you to build your own custom cloud application development services in Node.js on the Appcelerator cloud for all your mobile apps.
On the other hand, Ionic provides the following key features:
- Performance obsessed
- Utilizes Angular and React
- Native focused
"Easy to learn" is the top reason why over 3 developers like Appcelerator, while over 234 developers mention "Allows for rapid prototyping" as the leading cause for choosing Ionic.
Ionic is an open source tool with 38.5K GitHub stars and 13.1K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Ionic's open source repository on GitHub.
Accenture, Sellsuki, and Zenefits are some of the popular companies that use Ionic, whereas Appcelerator is used by BrightMachine, Manchester.com, and LilyPad. Ionic has a broader approval, being mentioned in 393 company stacks & 361 developers stacks; compared to Appcelerator, which is listed in 12 company stacks and 3 developer stacks.