Flutter vs React Native
Flutter or React Native? Which one is better for mobile apps? Which option will be more beneficial for your project? In the article, you’ll find comprehensive answers to these questions.
Digitization is the need of the hour. With the advancement in technologies, businesses need to find a way to increase their reach. Mobile applications are an essential medium to extend the circle. An average individual spends about 90% of their online time using mobile or web applications. Software application development needs to be approached in such a manner that the apps can be accessed and used by everyone alike.
In this cutthroat market with a surplus of apps, grabbing an advantage is a great deal and to make a beautiful looking app that offers top-notch functionalities with matchless user experience is a lot to think of. Still, with the right framework, this is a no brainer. There are many solutions available but the most popular one right now is : creating compiled apps that give the closest performance of the real native applications. The most powerful contenders in this field today are Google’s Flutter and Facebook’s React Native.
Flutter vs React Native, the debate rages on, since both offer some of the best options for cross-platform mobile development. Here’s a definitive guide to help you choose between these two leading cross-platform development frameworks.
Flutter vs React Native: Head to Head Comparison
1. Programming Language
React Native: React Native runs on JavaScript which ranks among the top programming languages. ReactJS is a JavaScript library mainly used for building user interfaces. JS is a very commonly used language and hence does not require extensive learning to understand it. ReactJS is used across various web applications, a specific pathway to build out its forms has to be used which is accomplished by using — ReactJS lifecycle.
Flutter: Flutter, on the other hand, works on a relatively new programming language called Dart, which is not widely used outside of Google. Even though the adoption rate of Dart in the industry is not very high, the subset of the developer community that has been working on it has all good things to say about it. Dart has been designed in such a manner that it makes compiling of native code faster and also it is simpler to customize widgets.
Dart has been quickly adopted by developers as it is more expressive. But since JavaScript has been around longer, developers prefer the React Native framework in terms of language.
2. Configuration & Setup
React Native: React Native does not provide a proper setup roadmap. It starts with the creation of a new project. There is a little guideline that tells how to use the Xcode tools but it does not provide enough information for a proper setup.
Flutter: Flutter’s setup process is much more straightforward as compared to React Native. It provides a detailed guide to install it properly. It also has Flutter doctor as a CLI tool that helps developers to install Flutter without much trouble.
We derive that Flutter provides better CLI support and a proper roadmap in setting up the framework.
3. User Interface (UI/UX)
React Native: React Native App Development uses third-party libraries since it does not have a UI components library of its own. React Native Elements, React Native material design and Shoutem are other similar UI libraries that are available to the user. While comparing user Interfaces between React Native vs flutter, React Native is like similar to using HTML without any CSS framework.
Flutter: Flutter accompanies built-in beautiful Material Design and Cupertino like iOS-flavor widgets, rich motion APIs, smooth natural scrolling, and platform awareness. Flutter has its own UI components, material design, adaptable widget sets and an engine to render them on Android as well as an iOS platform.
Therefore, React Native offers a more native-like user experience for your app while Flutter gives you more flexibility in UI design.
4. Hot Reload
Hot Reloading feature helps to display the updated UI Content, whenever user saves the code. It helps you to quickly build UIs, add features, and fix bugs. Hot reload works by injecting updated source code files into the running Virtual Machine (VM). The framework automatically rebuilds the widget tree, allowing you to quickly view the effects of your changes.
Both Flutter and React Native support stateful hot reloading which is blazing fast compared to how true native apps recompile in Android Studio and XCode. If your app encounters an error, you can typically fix the error and then continue on as if the error never happened.
You can make a change to a Flutter app while it is running, and it will reload the app’s code that has changed and let it continue from where you left off. Hot reload of React Native is not as fast as that of flutter.
Flutter is the winner because of faster hot reloading than React Native.
5. Community Support
React Native: React Native released as open-source on GitHub in 2015 and is the most popular framework on Stack Overflow as it is backed by a huge community with 68k stars on GitHub, 14.5k user subreddit, ~9000 user Discord chat. Therefore, It enjoys the support of a large community and is quite stable since its launch.
Flutter: The Flutter team has a huge support stats with ~4.5k user subreddit, ~30k stars on GitHub, and on Stack Overflow. Despite Dart not receiving much love in the Stack Overflow developer survey, early blog posts have been positive towards the use of Flutter. It is relatively new but is certainly growing strong in recent times with markedly increased community engagement in recent years.
React Native has larger community support. There is still a long way to go for Flutter, but it is being acknowledged globally at present.
6. Unit Testing
First of all, let me explain what Unit testing actually is.
A unit may be an individual function, method, procedure, module, or object. Unit testing is a type of software testing where individual units or components of a software are tested. The purpose is to validate that each unit of the software code performs as expected. Unit Testing is done during the development of an application by the developers. It isolates a section of code and verifies its correctness.
React Native: Developers have all JavaScript frameworks available for testing at a unit level. However, when it comes to UI and automation testing, the situation is not that much bright. Although a number of third-party libraries are available, the picture remains blur.
Flutter: Flutter provides a rich set of testing features to test apps at the unit, widget, and integration level. It also has great documentation on testing Flutter apps available for the development team makes testing a seamless experience. It also has robust documentation in place for building and releasing Android and iOS apps on the Play Store and App Store respectively. Additionally, Flutter has officially documented the deployment process as well.
Flutter wins the battle owning to seamless documentation in place for testing and deploying the apps.
7. Cross Platform Development
React Native: React Native is a JavaScript framework for writing real, natively rendering iOS and Android applications. You can use React Native to write clean, fast mobile apps, from the comfort of a familiar framework and a single JavaScript codebase.
Flutter: In Flutter, we get separate folders both for the iOS and Android platforms as we create a new project. In each of these folders, we get various platform based app functions and permissions for the development, but the codebase is same for both of them. Flutter is new and hence, requires considerable time to develop projects
React Native is the winner with lesser development time in cross platform app development.
Who won the battle?
- The GitHub statistics represent the number of contributors to open-source projects of React Native are 9.1k, while this number for Flutter reaches 13k.
- Similarly, According to StackOverflow, in category of most loved technologies, Flutter’s score is 68.8%, while React Native stands second with 57.9% of votes.
- But stats may vary everyday, so we can’t decide the winner. Both the frameworks have their own set of pros and cons. React Native might be the base of preexisting apps, but Flutter has taken the developer community by storm. It has increasingly gained popularity since its inception.
- With the advancement of the Flutter Software Development Kit(SDK), Flutter is becoming more and more advanced and preferable for cross-platform app development.
- Hence, Flutter overtakes React Native at certain points and vice versa. Both provide a powerful framework for app development.
