StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Cross Platform Mobile Development
  5. Ionic vs Pencil

Ionic vs Pencil

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Ionic
Ionic
Stacks9.5K
Followers8.6K
Votes1.8K
Pencil
Pencil
Stacks6
Followers14
Votes0
GitHub Stars876
Forks38

Ionic vs Pencil: What are the differences?

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.

What is Pencil? A Microframework Inspired by Flask for Rust. A web application microframework for Rust.

Ionic belongs to "Cross-Platform Mobile Development" category of the tech stack, while Pencil can be primarily classified under "Microframeworks (Backend)".

Ionic and Pencil are both open source tools. Ionic with 38.5K GitHub stars and 13.1K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Pencil with 871 GitHub stars and 43 GitHub forks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Ionic, Pencil

Anonymous
Anonymous

CEO at ME!

Jun 7, 2020

Decided

While with Ionic it is possible to make mobile applications with only web technologies, Flutter is more performant and is easy to use if you are willing to learn Dart, which is a fun language. Plus, it has awesome documentation and, while its ecosystem isn't near as big as JavaScript's is, it has a good package manager called Pub and its packages are generally high quality.

403k views403k
Comments
Thuan
Thuan

FE Lead at SOLID ENGINEER

Jun 16, 2020

Decided
  • Javascripts is the most populated language in the world.
  • Easy to learn & deployed production
  • Fast development
  • Strong community
  • Completed Documents
  • Native performance with lower RAM used.
  • Easy to handle native issues by using native code like Java / Objective C
  • Powered by Facebook.
666k views666k
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

Ionic
Ionic
Pencil
Pencil

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.

A web application microframework for Rust

Performance obsessed;Utilizes Angular and React;Native focused;Beautifully designed;Based on Web Components;
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
876
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
38
Stacks
9.5K
Stacks
6
Followers
8.6K
Followers
14
Votes
1.8K
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 248
    Allows for rapid prototyping
  • 228
    Hybrid mobile
  • 208
    It's angularjs
  • 186
    Free
  • 179
    It's javascript, html, and css
Cons
  • 20
    Not suitable for high performance or UI intensive apps
  • 15
    Not meant for game development
  • 2
    Not a native app
No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available
Rust
Rust

What are some alternatives to Ionic, Pencil?

ExpressJS

ExpressJS

Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications.

Flutter

Flutter

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

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.

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.

Django REST framework

Django REST framework

It is a powerful and flexible toolkit that makes it easy to build Web APIs.

Sails.js

Sails.js

Sails is designed to mimic the MVC pattern of frameworks like Ruby on Rails, but with support for the requirements of modern apps: data-driven APIs with scalable, service-oriented architecture.

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.

Sinatra

Sinatra

Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort.

Framework7

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.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase