Mobile apps have been a go-to source for businesses to generate profits. Various startups & businesses have started joining the mobile bandwagon and launched mobile apps.
As per Statista, there are more than 3.14 apps on Google Play Store and 2.09 million apps on Apple’s App Store. The number is increasing every year.
If you also want to develop a mobile app for your startup or take your existing business online, you must be looking for the best solution.
As per current trends, creating a cross-platform app is the best thing. The reason being, it allows you to reach out to the potential audience on both platforms (Android and iOS).
Moreover, businesses globally have gone crazy about cross-platform frameworks because they allow you to use the same code on multiple platforms. Out of various cross-platform frameworks, Ionic and Flutter are widely chosen by businesses worldwide.
Both the hybrid frameworks allow businesses to launch top-notch mobile apps.
Here, we will look after Ionic Vs Flutter based on different factors. But, before that, let’s go through the basics:
Table of Contents
What is Ionic?
Ionic is an open-source UI toolkit that allows you to develop superior quality cross-platform mobile apps. It utilizes the Webview for mobile rather than the native device elements.
Ionic can be integrated with popular front-end frameworks such as Angular, React, Vue, and also without any framework such as Vanilla javascript.
What is Flutter?
Flutter is an open-source mobile UI framework released by Google. It is beneficial to develop attractive, natively compiled apps for mobile, web, and desktop from the same codebase.
Moreover, Flutter is also effective for developing expressive and flexible UI considering the native-end user experiences.
Now, before we look at the differences between Ionic and Flutter, let’s look at the similarities between both frameworks.
Common Features Between Flutter and Ionic
Both cross-platform frameworks have several common characteristics as their end goal is the same: develop top-notch mobile apps.
- Both enable developing splendid client interfaces with eye-catchy design and responsive features.
- Apps built with Ionic and Flutter offer next-level performance as compared to other hybrid frameworks.
- Offline access
Now, let’s quickly jump to the Ionic Vs Flutter comparison on various crucial factors.
Ionic vs Flutter: A Detailed Comparison
Both the frameworks possess some of the best features, and that’s why it’s challenging to choose one. Hence, we have compared Ionic and Flutter based on some well-known aspects.
Performance
When choosing a cross-platform framework, performance is the most crucial factor. The performance of any mobile app depends highly on the quality of the code.
While comparing the Ionic vs. Flutter performance, Ionic offers 60FPS on desktop and mobile. It utilizes various third-party packages and plugins alongside front-end technologies to enhance the development process. The framework possesses an interactive time of about 1.8 secs.
Flutter gives enhanced performance than other frameworks and does not require any medium to connect with native modules because of its default components. A hello world app runs smoothly at 60 FPS, and each frame takes just 16 ms to render. Flutter utilizes many plugins, widgets, and its rendering engine to build attractive, performant hybrid apps.
Sustainability
Here, sustainability means better shelf-life and flexibility.
When you develop a hybrid app using Ionic, you select a broader platform as compared to Flutter. By building an app on Ionic, you accept open web standards. It enables you to go with the same standard and forms a unique script for developing a cross-platform app.
Flutter possesses a complex ecosystem, and it is still growing. Therefore, one needs to make more effort for developing and running an app using Flutter.
Hence, Ionic is best when it comes to sustainability.
Modularity
Modularity is a capability to enable people with different technical skills and experiences to work on the same project.
Ionic allows modularity with Angular’s @NgModule class. Developers can build various components by utilizing modules and bringing them together to create the structure of the app. Moreover, by integrating more modules one can enable lazy loading of the components.
Flutter provides enhanced accessibility for team diversity and division of the codes into various modules through its pub package system. A team can build various modules using plug-in ability and modify the database.
Learning Curve
Ionic is simple for all the developers who have good experience with Angular. These developers need to thoroughly go through the framework and particularly become familiar with the Cordova plug-ins or CLI. Moreover, developers who are good at JavaScript and have efficient experience in HTML/CSS can quickly get ahead with this framework.
Flutter is also easy to learn. However, a developer needs to be familiar with the Dart language to develop applications. Apart from Dart language, the developer also needs to have a fundamental knowledge of native Android or iOS development. Moreover, various developers have stated that the documentation of Flutter is easy as compared to Ionic.
Hence, Ionic is a clear winner and is easy to learn as compared to Flutter.
Community
Ionic was released in the year 2013. Until now, Ionic has obtained strong community support and is a widely preferred language by developers worldwide. On Github, Ionic has more than 44.1 stars. Apart from GitHub, Ionic developers are active on various other leading platforms such as Slack, Twitter, Reddit, Stack Overflow, and Gitter.
Flutter was released in the year 2017, and it is a bit late as compared to Ionic. Despite being late, many developers across the world are rapidly adopting Flutter for developing cross-platform apps. On GitHub, Flutter has got 120k stars. Apart from GitHub, Flutter developers are active on different platforms like Slack, Discord, Gitter, Reddit, Flutterday, and Stack Overflow.
Conclusion
Here we conclude our detailed comparison on Ionic and Flutter. While looking at the battle of Ionic vs Flutter, both the cross-platform frameworks are popular among the developers for creating hybrid applications.
To choose the best between Flutter and Ionic, you should carefully consider all your future goals. Apart from this, you can reach out to a mobile app development company. They will help you choose the best one as per your needs.