Ionic vs Web Starter Kit

Overview

Ionic

Stacks9.5K

Followers8.6K

Votes1.8K

Web Starter Kit

Stacks176

Followers207

Votes3

GitHub Stars18.4K

Forks3.0K

Ionic vs Web Starter Kit: What are the differences?

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; Web Starter Kit: Boilerplate & Tooling for Multi-Device Development. Web Starter Kit is a starting point for multi-screen web development. It encompasses opinionated recommendations on boilerplate and tooling for building an experience that works great across multiple devices. We help you stay productive and aligned with the best practices outlined in Google's Web Fundamentals.

Ionic and Web Starter Kit can be categorized as "Cross-Platform Mobile Development" tools.

Some of the features offered by Ionic are:

Performance obsessed
Utilizes Angular and React
Native focused

On the other hand, Web Starter Kit provides the following key features:

Multi-device responsive boilerplate
Living component style guide
Cross-device Synchronization

"Allows for rapid prototyping" is the top reason why over 234 developers like Ionic, while over 2 developers mention "Easy to use" as the leading cause for choosing Web Starter Kit.

Ionic and Web Starter Kit are both open source tools. It seems that Ionic with 38.5K GitHub stars and 13.1K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Web Starter Kit with 18.6K GitHub stars and 3.21K 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)

Manual

Advice on Ionic, Web Starter Kit

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

Ionic	Web Starter Kit
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.	Web Starter Kit is a starting point for multi-screen web development. It encompasses opinionated recommendations on boilerplate and tooling for building an experience that works great across multiple devices. We help you stay productive and aligned with the best practices outlined in Google's Web Fundamentals.
Performance obsessed;Utilizes Angular and React;Native focused;Beautifully designed;Based on Web Components;	Multi-device responsive boilerplate;Living component style guide;Cross-device Synchronization;Live Browser Reloading;Performance optimization;Built in HTTP Server;PageSpeed Insights Reporting;Sass support
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 18.4K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 3.0K
Stacks 9.5K	Stacks 176
Followers 8.6K	Followers 207
Votes 1.8K	Votes 3
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 3 Easy to use
Integrations
No integrations available	gulp

What are some alternatives to Ionic, Web Starter Kit?

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.

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.

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by Ionic are:

Performance obsessed
Utilizes Angular and React
Native focused

On the other hand, Web Starter Kit provides the following key features:

Multi-device responsive boilerplate
Living component style guide
Cross-device Synchronization

"Allows for rapid prototyping" is the top reason why over 234 developers like Ionic, while over 2 developers mention "Easy to use" as the leading cause for choosing Web Starter Kit.

Ionic vs Web Starter Kit