React Native and Flutter are free, open-source mobile app development frameworks. React Native is developed by Facebook while Flutter is developed by Google. Both of these tools are amazing! You can build iOS and Android apps using them.
Using React Native and Flutter, you can build high-performance mobile apps. These tools let you complete your app development project very fast. Development tools and useful features in these frameworks allow you to develop your apps very easily.
In this article, I will give you a comparison between React Native and Flutter. I hope you will find this comparison useful!
Development time
Development time is one of the most important factors that you should consider while choosing a mobile app development framework. If you can complete your project in a very small amount of time, it’s a great advantage for you.
React Native: The Hot Reloading feature in React Native saves you a lot of time. With this feature, you don’t need to compile your code again and again. You can simply reload your app without recompiling the code using the Hot Reloading feature. Besides, the prebuilt components save you a lot of time.
Flutter: You can Hot Reload in Flutter, also. Instead of spending time in recompiling, you can simple hot reload your app. The fully customizable widgets let you build rich UIs quickly. Different kinds of widgets and APIs speed up the development process. Take a look at the list of widgets here.
Performance
If your mobile app is slow, nobody will want to use it. So performance is extremely important. There are many mobile app development tools on the market. But you have to choose the tool using which you can build super-fast mobile apps.
React Native: With React Native, you can get near-native performance for your mobile app. To speed up your mobile app, you can write some part of your app using native code directly and the other parts in React Native. This framework lets you use native code directly.
Flutter: Flutter also gives you near-native performance for your app by letting you use native code (Java, Objective-C, and Swift code) in your app. Also, platform differences such as icons, fonts, navigation, and scrolling have been incorporated in widgets to give your app a smooth performance.
The official sites of React Native and Flutter claim that you will get native performance with these tools. But in my opinion, you will get near-native performance. Native performance is achievable only when you’re building your app using only native code. For Android, you can achieve truly native performance when you write your app using only Java, and for iOS, you can achieve truly native performance for your app when you’re using only Objective-C and Swift.
Frameworks have come to speed up your app development process at the cost of app performance.
User-interface
A rich user-interface gives a rich user-experience. Developing high-quality user-interfaces is very important. If you want to succeed with your app, you have to develop cool UIs that makes the app user-friendly. Using mobile app development frameworks, you can easily create UIs, you don’t need to spend much time and give much effort. Creating UIs is super-easy with frameworks.
React Native: Using declarative components, you can build high-quality UIs with React Native.
Flutter: You can build rich UIs using the widgets. The layered architecture in Flutter lets you perform full customization so that you can design flexible UIs that render very fast.
Market share
When you know that a particular mobile app development framework has a great market share, you can trust the framework. If you find that a framework is used by great companies, you have to understand that it is a really good framework, although there can be exceptions.
React Native: React Native has been used by popular mobile apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Ads Manager, Facebook Analytics, Skype, Pinterest, F8, Bloomberg, Tesla, Walmart, Uber, Artsy, Discord, and so on.
[Source: React Native official site]
Flutter: Flutter has been used by great mobile apps such as Alibaba, AppTree, Google Adwords, Topline, Coach Yourself, Birch Finance, Hookle, Hamilton Musical, Google Greentea, Beta Bubs, VivaBem UOL, and so on.
[Source: Flutter official site]
Keep in mind that Flutter is a comparatively new framework, released in May 2017 while React Native was released in March 2015.
[Source: Google Trends]
Documentation, tutorials, and community support
When a framework has enough documentation, good number of tutorials, and a great support from the developers’ community, the app development journey becomes a lot easier, you can learn the framework easily, and if you have employees, you don’t need to give them much training. They can easily learn on their own if there is a great amount of help available on the Internet.
React Native: On GitHub, React Native has 1,676 contributors, as of writing this article. There are enough documentation and high-quality tutorials for this framework given on the official site.
Flutter: On GitHub, React Native has 208 contributors, as of writing this article. On the official site, there are high-quality documentation and tutorials for this framework, also.
For both of these tools, there are a huge number of tutorials and articles available on the Internet.
This article gave you a concise comparison between React Native and Flutter. I have talked about important factors such as development time, performance, community support, etc. We have seen from this article that both the frameworks have amazing advantages! Both of them are from great companies. If you want to learn more about these frameworks and get a better idea of these tools, I suggest you take a close look at their official websites and use them in small demo projects. When you use them, you can understand which one would be the best fit for your next mobile app.
I hope you found this article useful! If you need a mobile app developed, call us at +60197570530 or email us at hello@virtualspirit.me. We have a team of experts who can develop high-quality mobile apps for you!
