Ionic vs PhoneGap

Overview

PhoneGap

Stacks578

Followers685

Votes94

GitHub Stars4.0K

Forks889

Ionic

Stacks9.5K

Followers8.6K

Votes1.8K

Ionic vs PhoneGap: 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 PhoneGap? Easilily create mobile apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. 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.

Ionic and PhoneGap belong to "Cross-Platform Mobile Development" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Ionic are:

Performance obsessed
Utilizes Angular and React
Native focused

On the other hand, PhoneGap provides the following key features:

Android
Blackberry
iOS

"Allows for rapid prototyping" is the top reason why over 234 developers like Ionic, while over 44 developers mention "Javascript" as the leading cause for choosing PhoneGap.

Ionic and PhoneGap are both open source tools. It seems that Ionic with 38.5K GitHub stars and 13.1K forks on GitHub has more adoption than PhoneGap with 4.15K GitHub stars and 974 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Ionic has a broader approval, being mentioned in 393 company stacks & 361 developers stacks; compared to PhoneGap, which is listed in 86 company stacks and 36 developer stacks.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on PhoneGap, Ionic

Gabor

CTO at momento.

Aug 23, 2021

Decided

As a startup, we need the maximum flexibility and the ability to reach our customers in a more suitable way. So a hybrid application approach is the best because it allows you to develop a cross-platform application in a unique codebase. The choice behind Ionic is Angular, I think that angular is the best framework to develop a complex application that needs a lot of service interaction, its modularity forces you (the developer) to write the code in the correct way, so it can be maintainable and reusable.

209k views209k

Comments

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

Saber

Senior software engineer at Shortcut

Jun 28, 2021

Needs adviceon

Ionic

React Native

JavaScript

Greetings!

I have been searching lately for frameworks to build mobile apps.

We are trying to make something like a quiz app as a way for customers to contact us. I considered Ionic and React Native because we use JavaScript most of the time in websites, e.g., Vue.js/Nuxt.js. But Flutter seems a decent choice as well, especially since you can use Android/iOS-like components. We are looking for something that works in the long term, something that's time and cost-effective, especially when paired with backend services like Firebase or a GraphQL server. I would like to know your opinions and recommendations. Thank you!

281k views281k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

PhoneGap	Ionic
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.	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.
Android;Blackberry;iOS;Windows Phone;Windows8	Performance obsessed;Utilizes Angular and React;Native focused;Beautifully designed;Based on Web Components;
Statistics
GitHub Stars 4.0K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 889	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 578	Stacks 9.5K
Followers 685	Followers 8.6K
Votes 94	Votes 1.8K
Pros & Cons
Pros 46 Javascript 13 Backed by Adobe 11 Free 9 Easy and developer friendly 6 Support more platforms Cons 2 Never as good as a native app 1 Poor user experience 1 Created for web pages, not for complex Apps 1 Hard to see 1 Not build for high performance	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

What are some alternatives to PhoneGap, Ionic?

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.

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.

Vue Native

Vue Native is a mobile framework to build truly native mobile app using Vue.js. Its is designed to connect React Native and Vue.js. Vue Native is a wrapper around React Native APIs, which allows you to use Vue.js and compose rich mobile User Interface.

Shoutem UI

Shoutem UI is a set of styleable components that enables you to build beautiful React Native applications for iOS and Android. All of our components are built to be both composable and customizable.

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by Ionic are:

Performance obsessed
Utilizes Angular and React
Native focused

On the other hand, PhoneGap provides the following key features:

Android
Blackberry
iOS

"Allows for rapid prototyping" is the top reason why over 234 developers like Ionic, while over 44 developers mention "Javascript" as the leading cause for choosing PhoneGap.

Ionic vs PhoneGap