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  5. Flutter vs React

Flutter vs React

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

React
React
Stacks182.6K
Followers147.0K
Votes4.1K
GitHub Stars240.3K
Forks49.7K
Flutter
Flutter
Stacks17.7K
Followers16.8K
Votes1.2K
GitHub Stars173.7K
Forks29.4K

Flutter vs React: What are the differences?

Introduction

Flutter and React are both popular frameworks used for building cross-platform mobile applications. While they serve the same purpose, there are key differences between the two that developers should consider when choosing which framework to use.

  1. Performance: Flutter has its own rendering engine, called Skia, which allows it to achieve exceptional performance. It uses Dart, a compiled language, which enables it to provide near-native performance. React, on the other hand, uses a virtual DOM to update only the required components, which can impact performance compared to Flutter.

  2. Language: Flutter uses Dart as its programming language, which is a statically-typed language developed by Google. React, on the other hand, uses JavaScript, which is a dynamically-typed language widely used in web development. This difference in languages can have an impact on how developers approach and write code within the respective frameworks.

  3. Hot Reload: Flutter offers a feature called "Hot Reload" that allows developers to see the changes made in the code instantly, without having to recompile the entire application. This makes the development process faster and more efficient. React, while also offering a similar feature called "Fast Refresh", is not as instant as Flutter's Hot Reload.

  4. UI Components: Flutter has its own set of UI widgets and components that are consistent across different platforms. This means that the UI created using Flutter will look the same on both iOS and Android devices. React, however, relies on the native components of the platform, which may result in slight differences in the UI across different devices.

  5. Development Environment: Flutter provides a comprehensive development environment called "Flutter SDK" that includes all the necessary tools and libraries needed for development. React, on the other hand, requires additional packages and libraries to be installed separately, resulting in a more complex setup process.

  6. Community Support: Both Flutter and React have active and growing communities, but React has been around for a longer time and has a larger community compared to Flutter. This means that React has a wider range of third-party libraries, resources, and community support available, making it easier for developers to find solutions and get help.

In summary, Flutter and React have differences in terms of performance, language, hot reload, UI components, development environment, and community support. These differences should be considered when choosing a framework for cross-platform mobile application development.

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Advice on React, Flutter

Cyrus
Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs adviceonVue.jsVue.jsReactReact

I find using Vue.js to be easier (more concise / less boilerplate) and more intuitive than writing React. However, there are a lot more readily available React components that I can just plug into my projects. I'm debating whether to use Vue.js or React for an upcoming project that I'm going to use to help teach a friend how to build an interactive frontend. Which would you recommend I use?

884k views884k
Comments
Cyrus
Cyrus

Aug 15, 2019

Needs advice

Simple datepickers are cumbersome. For such a simple data input, I feel like it takes far too much effort. Ideally, the native input[type="date"] would just work like it does on FF and Chrome, but Safari and Edge don't handle it properly. So I'm left either having a diverging experience based on the browser or I need to choose a library to implement a datepicker since users aren't good at inputing formatted strings.

For React alone there are tons of examples to use https://reactjsexample.com/tag/date/. And then of course there's the bootstrap datepicker (https://bootstrap-datepicker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), jQueryUI calendar picker, https://github.com/flatpickr/flatpickr, and many more.

How do you recommend going about handling date and time inputs? And then there's always moment.js, but I've observed some users getting stuck when presented with a blank text field. I'm curious to hear what's worked well for people...

401k views401k
Comments
Melly
Melly

Dec 19, 2019

Needs advice

Hi, we are an early startup (with an iPOC prototype) but need to get started on our MVP, and our tech developers in India recommended a hybrid, and they use Ionic, then we spoke with a software company in the US and he recommended Flutter or React Native. Any advice or input for us on the differences between these? Our app will need Bluetooth GPS for "near me" and social media sharing reviews capability, and also link on the backend with businesses. Thanks in advance for any help you can give!

540k views540k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

React
React
Flutter
Flutter

Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.

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

Declarative; Component-based; Learn once, write anywhere
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
240.3K
GitHub Stars
173.7K
GitHub Forks
49.7K
GitHub Forks
29.4K
Stacks
182.6K
Stacks
17.7K
Followers
147.0K
Followers
16.8K
Votes
4.1K
Votes
1.2K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 837
    Components
  • 674
    Virtual dom
  • 579
    Performance
  • 509
    Simplicity
  • 442
    Composable
Cons
  • 41
    Requires discipline to keep architecture organized
  • 30
    No predefined way to structure your app
  • 29
    Need to be familiar with lots of third party packages
  • 13
    JSX
  • 10
    Not enterprise friendly
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
No integrations available
Android SDK
Android SDK
Firebase
Firebase
Dart
Dart

What are some alternatives to React, Flutter?

jQuery

jQuery

jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.

AngularJS

AngularJS

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

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.

Vue.js

Vue.js

It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.

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.

jQuery UI

jQuery UI

Whether you're building highly interactive web applications or you just need to add a date picker to a form control, jQuery UI is the perfect choice.

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.

Svelte

Svelte

If you've ever built a JavaScript application, the chances are you've encountered – or at least heard of – frameworks like React, Angular, Vue and Ractive. Like Svelte, these tools all share a goal of making it easy to build slick interactive user interfaces. Rather than interpreting your application code at run time, your app is converted into ideal JavaScript at build time. That means you don't pay the performance cost of the framework's abstractions, or incur a penalty when your app first loads.

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.

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