One of the ongoing debates among mobile app developers has been around Flutter vs. React native. Which one should you choose for your project? What are the differences between Flutter and React Native? Which one is better?

Flutter and React Native are considered to be two of the most powerful cross-platform application technologies, gaining popularity in a short period of time. However, it’s important to understand the main differences between the two to choose the right one for your project. In this article, we’re going to compare Flutter and React Native across a variety of different factors to help you pick the technology that suits you and your project best.

What is Flutter?

Flutter is a cross-platform UI framework developed by Google. It can be expressed on any mobile device or tied to your existing applications.

One of the powerful features of Flutter is the ability to create applications using a single codebase. It allows developers to easily build and deploy visually attractive, natively compiled applications for web, desktop, and mobile (Android, iOS) with one tool.

What is React Native?

React Native is another popular cross-platform framework that was developed by Facebook. This open-source technology supports easy implementation of native UI components, platform-specific code, and hot reloading. Similarly to Flutter, React Native allows software developers to build an app using one codebase.

As an open-source UI software framework, React Native has one of the largest developer support communities in the world. Developers love the ease of its dozens of ‘plug and play’ program modules.

Flutter vs. React Native: Comparison

Choosing between Flutter vs React Native might seem like a dilemma, especially when you have to pick one for mobile app development. To clear things out and help you pick the right framework for your project, we’ll shed some light on the main differences between Angular vs React, helping you choose the most suitable one for your project:

One of the ongoing debates among mobile app developers has been around Flutter vs. React native. Which one should you choose for your project? What are the differences between Flutter and React Native? Which one is better?

Flutter and React Native are considered to be two of the most powerful cross-platform application technologies, gaining popularity in a short period of time. However, it’s important to understand the main differences between the two to choose the right one for your project. In this article, we’re going to compare Flutter and React Native across a variety of different factors to help you pick the technology that suits you and your project best.

What is Flutter?

Flutter is a cross-platform UI framework developed by Google. It can be expressed on any mobile device or tied to your existing applications.

One of the powerful features of Flutter is the ability to create applications using a single codebase. It allows developers to easily build and deploy visually attractive, natively compiled applications for web, desktop, and mobile (Android, iOS) with one tool.

What is React Native?

React Native is another popular cross-platform framework that was developed by Facebook. This open-source technology supports easy implementation of native UI components, platform-specific code, and hot reloading. Similarly to Flutter, React Native allows software developers to build an app using one codebase.

As an open-source UI software framework, React Native has one of the largest developer support communities in the world. Developers love the ease of its dozens of ‘plug and play’ program modules.

Flutter vs. React Native: Comparison

Choosing between Flutter vs React Native might seem like a dilemma, especially when you have to pick one for mobile app development. To clear things out and help you pick the right framework for your project, we’ll shed some light on the main differences between Angular vs React, helping you choose the most suitable one for your project:

Parameters	Flutter	React Native
Developed By	Google	Facebook
Language	Dart	JavaScript
Performance	Comes with native components that allow the applications to perform better.	JavaScript bridges enable communication between native components that affect the overall application performance.
Learning Difficulty	Relatively harder	Relatively easier if you’re already familiar with JavaScript
Community Support	Relatively small	Large
User Interface	Pre-built widgets, lesser UI customizations	External UI kits, more UI options
Documentation	Simple and streamlined	Disorganized
Suitability for Complex Applications	Not suitable	Suitable

Flutter vs. React Native: Performance

Flutter

Generally, developers need to write the code, wait for it to compile and load to the device before seeing any changes. However, with Flutter, things are sped up – hot reload, one of Flutter’s most significant advantages, allows iOS and Android developers to test changes immediately. This also creates space for effective collaboration between developers, designers, and QA engineers, speeding up the app development process.

Moreover, Flutter offers widgets that allow software developers to easily create apps of any complexity. Those widgets are extensible, fast, and reliable, so the entire process is quicker and simpler regardless of the screen size.

React Native

When comparing the performance of Flutter vs React Native, it generally comes out in favor of Flutter due to the power and elegance of its design. That’s one of the reasons why many developers opt for Flutter.

However, although JavaScript bridges can slow React Native down, React Native apps aren’t slow. React Native has a live reload feature – equivalent to the hot reload feature in Flutter – that allows developers to easily view the changes in the application without the need to rebuild the whole application. Therefore, this feature speeds up the app development process, making it easier to fix bugs.

While it’s true that the React Native code can become a little sluggish when creating complex applications, developers have the option to create and deploy some native modules to get rid of the performance issues.

Flutter vs React Native: Community Support

According to StackOverflow’s Developer Survey, Flutter and React Native are considered to be the two most popular cross-platform tools. However, one is taking the lead as the most ‘loved’ framework. The survey further shares that Flutter is loved by 68.03% of the respondents, while React Native is loved by 55.98% of software developers.

Flutter

Although the size of the Flutter community is not as large as the React Native’s, more and more developers are adopting it slowly. With the continued investment flow from Google, the Flutter community will continue to grow.

React Native

Released as an open-source framework in 2015, React Native has a vast community of dedicated developers who’re active and eager to help React Native developers. They provide a variety of technologies like, React Native components, JSX, and JavaScript code.

Flutter vs. React Native: Language

Flutter

Dart is used for Flutter, a programming language developed by Google in 2011. Although Dart has an elegant syntax, its object-oriented concepts can take time to learn. Similarly to JavaScript, Dart is an event-driven language and supports asynchronous data processing.

React Native

React Native is written entirely in JavaScript. This is an advantage for React Native as JavaScript is one of the most widely used languages in the world today. JavaScript’s main advantages are considered to be scalability and event-driven functioning.

Flutter vs. React Native: User Interface

Flutter

Proprietary visual, interactive, and structural widgets are used by Flutter. They’re built-in UI components that replace native platform components. These widgets have the same hierarchical principles as at React Native.

React Native

React Native relies on native components for both iOS and Android devices. It offers an extensive collection of external UI kits that help developers create stunning user interfaces for applications.

Flutter vs. React Native: Learning Curve

Flutter

Dart can be challenging to learn as a developer. However, working with Flutter will be an easy ride once you get the hang of it.

React Native

Unlike Dart, JavaScript is somewhat easier to learn since most web developers have experience working with JavaScript. However, the means of using this language for mobile app development differs from web development. Therefore, the transition may be challenging.

Flutter vs. React Native: Conclusion

To make the right selection between Flutter vs React Native for your project, you must carefully evaluate the project parameters and business needs surrounding it. Although Flutter and React Native are powerful cross-platform development frameworks, their use cases aren’t exactly the same.

For example, Flutter might be a better choice for developing cross-platform mobile apps on par with native applications (performance-wise). In comparison, React Native is a great option for developing complex mobile apps with a significant number of functionalities.

To sum up, Flutter and React Native are great choices to save time and money on mobile application development. Whether you choose Flutter or React, Native will depend on your preferences, business needs, and project requirements.

If you’re a developer looking for a remote job, TalentGrid is here to help!