In recent years, most organizations have switched from desktop websites to mobile apps as a fast-track way to reach a global audience.
Due to this rapid popularity, many companies are creating their versions of mobile applications for specific purposes.
If you are starting a company and want to spend on a mobile app, finding the right solution for your needs is the only problem.
Businesses prefer hybrid frameworks for mobile app development because they follow the one-time coding principle and deploy it everywhere.
It dramatically reduces costs while also cutting down on development time. The two most popular options are Ionic vs. Flutter. Both Ionic and Flutter share a joint mission of creating beautiful applications with interactive UIs.
And according to Google Trends, Flutter is more popular and searched than Ionic.
In this article, I will be discussing the general vital points and conducting a detailed comparison of the two most popular mobile development frameworks, Ionic and Flutter.
Here we go…
Ionic vs. Flutter – Market Usage Statistics
Ionic Stats
- Star rating on GitHub- 4.3/5
- Forks on GitHub- 14.3k
- Watchers on GitHub- 1.3k
- Stack Overflow questions- 58.3k
Flutter Stats
- Star rating on GitHub- 4.5/5
- Forks on GitHub- 20.5k
- Watchers on GitHub- 1.8k
- Stack Overflow questions- 63.7k
These are the basic statistical differences between the Ionic and Flutter. Now, let’s have a look into them separately.
Flutter: A Brief Introduction
Created by Google in 2018, Flutter is scalable and fast, with a UX platform that plugs directly into your backend code. And it uses Dart as its code. As a result, it works well with JavaScript for backend functions and similarly with Objective C and Swift in iOS. This is a significant difference between ionic vs. Flutter.
Flutter is made up of two core components:
• SDK (Software Development Kit): This is a set of tools that will help you build your applications.
• Framework (Widget-Based User Interface Library): This is a set of standard user interface elements that you can customize to meet your requirements.
Flutter Pros And Cons
What’s Flutter used for?
To really understand the Ionic vs. Flutter frameworks, you should see them in an actual use case environment. You are most likely to see Flutter use in:
• Apps using Material Design Language
• Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which can use Flutter’s light construction to build first version or proof of concept apps rapidly
• Skia is used for high-speed, high-performance rendering
• Simple Logic OS Plugins
• UX with hefty data integration & user interaction
• User interfaces that use code-intensive widgets
What is Ionic?
The first stable version of the Ionic framework was launched in March 2014. Ionic is an open-source UI toolkit that uses web technologies such as JavaScript, CSS, and HTML; to architect top-notch desktop, mobile, and advanced web applications.
Ionic majorly focuses on the front-end UX & UI interaction. And, therefore plays a significant role in handling the look and feel of an application.
It is not only capable of integrating with other frameworks and libraries such as Angular, Cordova, etc. but it can also be used independently without the support of a front-end framework.
Some of the Ionic advantages are:
• One version does it all – Ionic operates on a singular code base anchored to a whole array of JS libraries. This eliminates duplication of code to sync with other platforms.
• Works to scale – there is no strict limit on the number of users. Keep scaling up. Ionic can handle this.
What is Ionic Used for?
• Cross-platform mobile application development
• Hybrid mobile app development
• Hardware functionality enabled app
• MVC mobile apps
• Develop high-performance UX/UI applications
• Native wrapper
Ionic vs. Flutter: Know the Major Differences
1. Ionic vs. Flutter – Performance
It may be the most important metric for most developers out there. Ionic may lag you behind the standard level on a performance basis by using Cordova for running JavaScript. It is the inclusion of web technologies that causes a significant negative impact on its performance.
But when it comes to Flutter, it provides better performance by skipping the interactive bridge with native components. So if performance is an essential metric for your project or you need to access advanced features, you should hire Flutter app developers.
The main performance difference of Flutter vs. Ionic has always been about the code. Furthermore, their performance also depends on the size of the application.
If the bundle size is less, the runtime will be faster. In the case of Flutter, it requires heavy code to build a basic app, whereas Ionic uses the standard browser runtime.
2. Ionic vs. Flutter – Code Maintainability
Ionic has one of the largest communities, yet there may be some issues that you may encounter when maintaining the code for your application. In fact, Flutter is more convenient to carry than Ionic.
The flutter application is easy to maintain.
The code’s simplicity helps you source issues, and external tools and support third-party libraries.
In addition, the stateful hot reloading feature resolves urgent issues. As a result, the time taken to issue quality updates and make immediate changes to the application is considered better.
With Ionic, programmers often find themselves rewriting code to maintain consistency across their applications, making code maintenance a major challenge. What’s worse is that backward compatibility breaks down most of the time, making it a more frustrating experience.
3. Ionic vs. Flutter – Native Look and Feel
As far as users are concerned, both Flutter and Ionic will appear native for the most part. Although no single framework uses native UI elements from each platform, Flutter, and Ionic automatically update the design of their UI elements to match the platform the app is running on.
Both solutions allow you to access platform services and native APIs through a library of pre-built plugins, along with a set of tools to create your custom plugins as needed.
4. Ionic vs. Flutter – Sustainability
Sustainability is an ingenious factor in this battle of Ionic vs. Flutter. Here sustainability means shelf-life and flexibility of the project.
Ionic-powered projects tend to be more durable than flutter ones.
The reason behind this is simple. When you go with the Ionic, you’re choosing a more comprehensive platform than Flutter. When it comes to cross-platform application development, the broad platform helps developers get a stable and uniform script.
Moreover, you may also opt to hire the best app developers in India to build a customized application on Ionic. Whatever you create on Ionic, you adopt open web standards.
This allows you to follow the same standard and create a uniform script for developing cross-platform applications. And above all, you can use the app with any JavaScript framework.
5. Ionic vs. Flutter – Popularity and Real-world Usage
You could say that Flutter should be number one in this category, with 4.5/5 stars on GitHub and a significantly trending nature.
Despite being relatively new, Flutter already has some exciting apps built with it. Also, Flutter is heavily advertised by Google, and they want to make it a big thing.
Ionic is also very popular, although it is either not as popular or not used as Flutter. If we take the Github rating as an indicator, we can see that it has about 4.3/5 at the moment. Ionic doesn’t have any reputed mobile apps built with it, but many apps are still being built using it.
Popular Applications Built with Flutter:
• Alibaba
• Google Ads
• Tencent
• eBay
• Reflect
• BMW
Popular Apps Built with Ionic:
• MarketWatch
• TD Ameritrade Mobile
• Diesel
• Microsoft Flow
• Sworkit
Bottom Lines
I hope the blog has given you an idea about which app development framework you should choose for your next project. Both these cross-platform app development frameworks are unique in their own way.
So, choosing an appropriate framework depends on the requirements of your app development project. If you want to develop an app based on any of the two frameworks, you can reach out to a mobile app development company in India with expertise in both frameworks.
They will help you execute your next Flutter or Ionic projects on time and within budget constraints. If you have any further queries, do let me know in the comment section below.
Good Luck!
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