Flutter Vs. React Native, What to Choose and When?
In the war of top technologies like Flutter and React Native, it’s always difficult to back one technology just by looking into its features and current trends. Each of them may have its pros and cons and may perform differently under unique circumstances.
Introducing the most popular framework — Flutter and React Native 😍
React Native
- React Native is an app development framework for building Native applications. The framework was first released in March 2015 at the F8 conference by Facebook.
- It uses JavaScript as its programming language, its working principle is virtually identical to React. The only exception is that React Native does not manipulate the DOM via Virtual DOM.
- The Framework has 103k stars on GitHub.
Flutter
- Flutter is Google’s portable UI toolkit for building natively-compiled apps across mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. The Framework was officially released in December 2018 at the Google I/O conference.
- Flutter is written in Dart and makes use of many of its advanced programming language features.
- The Google toolkit has 138k starts on GitHub.
Let’s compare these well-known Frameworks from different perspectives and find out which is the best to choose in the end!
It’s quite interesting to look into the Google trends for Flutter Vs React Native 🧐
According to Google Trends, in the past 12 months, the popularity of Flutter is skyrocketing concerning React Native. It is good news for the Flutter developers as Flutter seems to be winning over time.
But these are just current trends. We need to see what is going on under the hood. How many apps are built with Flutter and React Native?
So, here comes another analytics from Appfigures👇
The analytics shows that React Native is ruling the current app market as the number of React Native apps available on the Google Play and Apple Play store is more than that of Flutter.
What does the developer community say about Flutter and React Native? 👍👎
Designing with Flutter Widgets vs React Components
Widgets are the basic building blocks of Flutter UI which have powerful UI features. Developers can also create their own widgets. Moreover, Flutter contains two sets of widgets that concern the specific design language.
The Material design widgets implement Google’s design language while the Cupertino widgets implement Apple’s iOS design. That means the Flutter application will look and behave the same way on each platform.
Just like widgets, components are the basic building block of React Native apps. These components can compile into the native Android and iOS views. Moreover, on any UI OS update, React Native app components are instantly upgraded as well.
If we compare both Flutter and React Native with respect to their UI, Flutter has a rich set of widgets compared to React Native. However, we can not deny the RN capability that gives a native appearance to respective platforms.
Performance Comparison
If you are building a simple app for the usual business apps with little animations then there is no performance issue, whatever the technology is used. But if you are building cross-platform applications with heavy CPU-intensive operations you must decide on which technology to use.
React Native renders native UI elements on state changes, and the native JavaScript code that runs inside the JavaScript engine communicates with the host app via a bridge that uses a JSON-based asynchronous communication approach.
In such a case if you do not use any runtime optimization strategy, React Native runtime will interpret the JavaScript bundle with JavaScript core reducing the app performance. Unlike React Native, Flutter neither uses JavaScript bridge nor JIT for a production app, the Flutter engine uses faster binary communications.
To deal with the performance issue React Native is rearchitected to streamline the development processes and make it more convenient for all the platforms.
Debugging Flutter and React Native application
Debugging is quite similar in Flutter and React Native, Flutter has “Hot Reload” while React Native has “Live Reload” functionality that enables developers to see code changes in real-time without breaking the current state.
Flutter offers a wide range of debugging tools that offers UI inspection, CPU profiling, memory, network profiling, and more. While in the case of React Native developers can use the Chrome dev tool for debugging React Native applications as it is based on JavaScript.
Developer’s community
React Native is open-source and backed by a huge developer community. It is maintained by the dedicated team of developers at Facebook. The developer community is highly active on different platforms such as stack overflow, Reddit, Dev.to, and other channels.
Even though Flutter is slightly younger than React Native, the community is rapidly growing since its introduction.
Getting closer to the conclusion: Which one to choose and when?✌
Choose Flutter if…
- You are familiar with the Dart and want to achieve high performance.
- Want to go cross-platform to build impressive applications with amazing UI.
- Have a limited budget and time.
- Want to reduce debugging issues.
- The project is small and simple.
- If you are building an MVP.
Choose React Native if…
- You are familiar with JavaScript.
- Have too much animation in your application
- Planning to reuse custom components across multiple applications.
- Building an app that requires lots of customization.
- If your project is larger than 4 MB and deeply rooted.
- If you are building a huge custom enterprise-level app that may extend in the future.
Final thoughts:
Though in the battle of React Native vs Flutter, Flutter seems to be more dominant we must remember the fact that Flutter is inspired by the React framework.
Every application is different and may have unique requirements. Therefore it’s always worth discussing your app idea and the overall project with experienced mobile app development specialists in both Flutter and Reacts Native.
Well, if you are choosing Flutter for cross-platform development, DhiWise is always here to help you!
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