Overview

Ionic

Stacks9.6K

Followers8.6K

Votes1.8K

React Native

Stacks34.3K

Followers29.5K

Votes1.2K

GitHub Stars124.4K

Forks24.9K

Ionic vs React Native: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Ionic and React Native are popular frameworks used for mobile app development. While both frameworks allow developers to build cross-platform mobile apps, there are key differences between them.

Code Reusability: One significant difference between Ionic and React Native is the level of code reusability. React Native allows for a higher level of code reusability compared to Ionic. With React Native, nearly all of the code can be shared between different platforms, resulting in faster development and reduced effort. Ionic, on the other hand, requires separate codebases for each platform, leading to less code being shared and potentially more development time.
Performance: React Native uses native components, which allows for better performance as compared to Ionic. React Native apps have access to device-specific APIs, resulting in faster rendering and smoother animations. In contrast, Ionic apps use web technologies wrapped in a WebView, which can cause some performance limitations and less efficient animations.
Learning Curve: Ionic is based on web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, making it relatively easier to learn for web developers. React Native, on the other hand, requires knowledge of React, which might have a steeper learning curve for those without prior experience. However, React Native's component-based architecture can make the development process more organized and easier to maintain.
Native Features and Integration: React Native allows developers to access device-specific features, such as the camera, GPS, and accelerometer, through pre-built components and APIs. This enables a seamless integration with the underlying platform and provides a more native-like experience. Ionic also supports native features, but it may require additional plugins or custom code to achieve the same level of integration.
Tooling and Ecosystem: React Native benefits from a larger and more mature ecosystem with a wide range of community-supported libraries, tools, and plugins. This extensive ecosystem provides developers with more options and resources to enhance their development process and solve common problems. While Ionic also has a considerable ecosystem, it might not be as extensive as React Native's ecosystem.
UI/UX Flexibility: Ionic offers a pre-defined set of UI components and themes, providing developers with ready-to-use UI elements. This can make the development process faster and more consistent. React Native, on the other hand, provides greater flexibility in terms of UI/UX customization. Developers can build highly customized and platform-specific UI components, resulting in a more tailored user experience.

In summary, React Native offers better code reusability, performance, access to native features, and a larger ecosystem, but has a steeper learning curve. Ionic is based on web technologies, making it easier to learn, but it lacks the same level of code reusability and performance. The choice between the two frameworks depends on the specific project requirements, developer expertise, and platform-specific needs.

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Advice on Ionic, React Native

Nick

CTO at Pickio

Jun 2, 2020

Decided

We built the first version of our app with RN and it turned out a mess in a while. A lot of bugs along with poor performance out of the box for a fairly large app. Many things, that native platform has, cannot be done with existing solutions for RN. For instance, large titles on iOS are not fully implemented in any of existing navigations libraries. Also there's painfully slow JSON bridge and many other small, yet annoying things. On the other hand Flutter became a really powerful and easy-to-use tool. A bit of a learning curve, of course, because of Dart, but it worth learning. Flutter offers TONS of built-in features, no JSON-bridge, AOT compilation for iOS.

490k views490k

Comments

Andrea

May 26, 2020

Needs adviceon

Vue.js

Vue Native

React

I'm a huge fan of Vue.js and I'm pretty comfortable with it. I need to build a mobile app for my company and I was now wondering whether I could make use of VueJS with Vue Native instead of switching to React. I know Vue Native builds on top of RN. My question is whether I'd have as much freedom with Vue Native over RN and whether you feel like Vue Native is "production ready" or not. Not sure of which shortcomings I may find using Vue Native... Thanks a lot!!!

336k views336k

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

Detailed Comparison

Ionic	React Native
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.	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.
Performance obsessed;Utilizes Angular and React;Native focused;Beautifully designed;Based on Web Components;	Native iOS Components;Asynchronous Execution;Touch Handling;Flexbox and Styling; Polyfills
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 124.4K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 24.9K
Stacks 9.6K	Stacks 34.3K
Followers 8.6K	Followers 29.5K
Votes 1.8K	Votes 1.2K
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	Pros 214 Learn once write everywhere 174 Cross platform 169 Javascript 122 Native ios components 69 Built by facebook Cons 23 Javascript 19 Built by facebook 12 Cant use CSS 4 30 FPS Limit 2 Slow

What are some alternatives to Ionic, React Native?

Flutter

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

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.

PhoneGap

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.

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.