Capacitor vs Flutter: What are the differences?

Capacitor and Flutter are two popular frameworks for developing cross-platform mobile applications. While both frameworks serve the purpose of creating high-performance apps that can run on multiple platforms, there are several key differences between the two. In this article, we will explore these differences and outline the specific advantages each framework offers.

1. Development Language: Capacitor allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills, as it uses web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. On the other hand, Flutter employs the Dart programming language, which is specifically designed for creating mobile applications.

2. User Interface: Capacitor uses native web technologies to render the user interface, resulting in a UI that looks and feels like a web app. In contrast, Flutter comes with its own set of customizable widgets, enabling the creation of highly polished and visually consistent UI across platforms.

3. Development Efficiency: Capacitor offers fast development speeds due to its ability to reuse web code and easily integrate web-based libraries and frameworks. Flutter, on the other hand, utilizes a hot reload feature, allowing developers to see the changes they make to the code instantly without restarting the application.

4. Native Access: Capacitor grants developers access to a wide range of existing native features and functionalities through its plugin system. Developers can directly access device APIs, sensors, and other system-level capabilities. In comparison, Flutter abstracts away direct access to native features, requiring developers to use platform-specific API wrappers or plugins to access certain functionalities.

5. Performance: Flutter's performance is often considered superior, thanks to its custom rendering engine that directly draws the user interface. This approach eliminates the performance overhead associated with interpreting and rendering web technologies, as is the case with Capacitor.

6. Community and Ecosystem: Flutter has a larger and more active community with a broad range of resources, tutorials, and open-source libraries. Capacitor, while still having an active community, may have a smaller ecosystem and fewer available resources.

In summary, Capacitor emphasizes compatibility with web technologies, offering development speed and ease of integration with existing web code, while Flutter focuses on creating highly polished UIs with native-like performance through its custom rendering engine and rich widgets.