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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Cross Platform Mobile Development
  5. Ionic vs Visual Studio App Center

Ionic vs Visual Studio App Center

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Ionic
Ionic
Stacks9.5K
Followers8.6K
Votes1.8K
Visual Studio App Center
Visual Studio App Center
Stacks113
Followers232
Votes4

Ionic vs Visual Studio App Center: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Ionic and Visual Studio App Center

Ionic and Visual Studio App Center are two popular tools used for developing mobile applications. While both serve the same purpose, there are several key differences between them.

  1. Development Platform:

    • Ionic is a cross-platform development framework that allows developers to build mobile apps using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
    • Visual Studio App Center, on the other hand, is a mobile application development and continuous integration platform that supports multiple development environments, including Xamarin, React Native, and Swift.
  2. Code Sharing:

    • Ionic offers a high level of code sharing between different mobile platforms. Developers can reuse a significant portion of their codebase when creating apps for iOS, Android, and other platforms.
    • Visual Studio App Center also supports code sharing but is more focused on native development. It provides tools and features specifically designed to help developers build native mobile apps for different platforms.
  3. User Interface Components:

    • Ionic provides a wide range of pre-built user interface components and themes. These components are designed to have a consistent look and feel across different platforms and help developers save time and effort.
    • Visual Studio App Center focuses more on providing tools for building the underlying infrastructure of the app rather than pre-built UI components. Developers have more control over the UI design and can create custom interfaces tailored to their specific requirements.
  4. Testing and Analytics:

    • Ionic offers built-in testing and analytics features that allow developers to monitor app performance, track user behavior, and make data-driven decisions. It provides tools like Ionic Appflow and Ionic Analytics for this purpose.
    • Visual Studio App Center also provides testing and analytics capabilities but emphasizes more on integrating with external testing frameworks and analytics services. It offers integrations with popular tools like Xamarin Test Cloud and HockeyApp.
  5. Deployment and Distribution:

    • Ionic provides a seamless deployment and distribution process through its Ionic Appflow platform. Developers can easily build, deploy, and distribute their apps to app stores as well as manage updates, rollbacks, and version control.
    • Visual Studio App Center offers similar deployment and distribution features but is more integrated with the Visual Studio ecosystem. Developers can leverage existing Visual Studio tools and workflows for building, testing, and distributing their apps.
  6. Community and Support:

    • Ionic has a vibrant and active community of developers and enthusiasts. It has a well-established documentation, forums, and community-driven resources that provide extensive support to developers.
    • Visual Studio App Center is backed by Microsoft and has a strong support network. It benefits from the extensive resources and support provided by Microsoft, including documentation, tutorials, and technical support.

In summary, Ionic is a cross-platform development framework that prioritizes code sharing, pre-built UI components, and seamless deployment, while Visual Studio App Center is a mobile application development platform that focuses on native development, integration with external tools, and strong support from Microsoft.

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Advice on Ionic, Visual Studio App Center

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
Visual Studio App Center
Visual Studio App Center

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.

Automate the lifecycle of your iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS apps. Connect your repo and within minutes build in the cloud, test on thousands of real devices, distribute to beta testers and app stores, and monitor real-world usage with crash and analytics data. All in one place.

Performance obsessed;Utilizes Angular and React;Native focused;Beautifully designed;Based on Web Components;
Build; Test; Distribute; Crashes; Diagnostics; Analytics; Push; CD/CI;
Statistics
Stacks
9.5K
Stacks
113
Followers
8.6K
Followers
232
Votes
1.8K
Votes
4
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
  • 1
    Bug tracking integration
  • 1
    Show error issues for mobile devices
  • 1
    For Mobile apps diagnostics and tracking
  • 1
    Slack integration
Integrations
No integrations available
GitHub
GitHub
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps
Slack
Slack

What are some alternatives to Ionic, Visual Studio App Center?

Jenkins

Jenkins

In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

Travis CI

Travis CI

Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

Codeship

Codeship

Codeship runs your automated tests and configured deployment when you push to your repository. It takes care of managing and scaling the infrastructure so that you are able to test and release more frequently and get faster feedback for building the product your users need.

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.

CircleCI

CircleCI

Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp.

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.

TeamCity

TeamCity

TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.

Drone.io

Drone.io

Drone is a hosted continuous integration service. It enables you to conveniently set up projects to automatically build, test, and deploy as you make changes to your code. Drone integrates seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket and Google Code as well as third party services such as Heroku, Dotcloud, Google AppEngine and more.

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