React Native vs Flutter: Detailed Comparison

Our team has felt this switch, too. Having started as a native Android/iOS Team, we’ve eventually laid our eyes on React Native and now the last few projects in our portfolio are React Native projects. However, in this article, we’ll try to stay as impartial as possible 🙂

Let’s start our Flutter vs React Native comparison by taking a brief look at some general info regarding this framework.

⚙️ What is React Native?

React Native — a JavaScript framework for mobile development — was introduced by Facebook in 2015. The idea was developed at the internal hackathon as a spinoff of React, another Facebook’s development framework but for the web.

By the way, that’s where the name “React Native” comes from. On the one hand, it embraced the advantages of web development from React. On the other hand, it works natively on both iOS and Android platforms and that’s where the “native” part comes from.

Except for these examples, the framework was also used by Skype, Tesla, SoundCloud, Vogue and many more.

🛠 What is Flutter?

Flutter is a UI toolkit by Google. You may also think of it as an SDK with tools and widgets for cross-platform development. With its help, you can create beautiful, natively-complied applications for mobile, web and desktop platforms.

If we break down Flutter into specific parts, these will be:

However, our goal isn’t only to answer the question “What is React Native?” (or Flutter) but also to compare Flutter vs React Native for app development. So let’s get down to business!

🏆 React Native vs Flutter: All-In-One Comparison

To compare React Native vs Flutter we chose 9 criteria:

1. Programming languages
2. Installation
3. Components
4. UI rendering
5. Platform-specific customizations
6. Testing
7. Build & Release Automation Support
8. Documentation
9. Community

Let’s take a closer look!

Programming languages

React Native developers use JavaScript. This is quite a popular language for web development which makes Facebook’s framework an interesting choice for web developers switching to mobile. With just a bit of training, they can deliver apps for both iOS and Android that only sometimes requires native coding.

Thus, React Native is a good option for In-House Web Teams that want to build mobile applications as well.

By the way, for many big companies, their experience with React Native started from such “web-to-mobile” experiments. For example, SoundCloud’s development team consisted of 2 JS developers and 1 iOS engineer.

JavaScript has a dynamic structure. However, developers who prefer statically-typed languages can use Typescript — a typed superset of JS.

Facebook Communities: React Native | Flutter

Interesting fact: despite the React Native community on Facebook is 5 times bigger, Flutter community grows at the same pace (approximately +500 users a month).

💡 Takeaways

Today Flutter and React Native are the top tools for cross-platform development. Both of them will reduce time-to-market and project costs but their efficiency may vary from project to project. Let’s sum up the key ideas of this Flutter vs React Native comparison to help you with the final choice:

• When it comes to a programming language, it’s more a matter of taste and personal preferences. If you or your team have experience with Facebook’s React — then switching to React Native will be a like a walk in the park. It will also be a good choice for developers with web (read JavaScript) background. Yet, if you prefer OO languages like Java, Objective-C, C++ and others over JS, Flutter may be a better option.
• Both frameworks have a quick and easy installation process.
• Flutter has more widgets — built-in UI components. Moreover, while in React Native they’re drawn from the platform side, in Flutter these are mockups of the native components that usually have a better performance.
• Speed is crucial for modern apps and both Flutter and React Native apps work almost equally fast.
• React Native applications usually require more platform-specific customizations using native code and are more dependant on third-party libraries.
• Both frameworks support the hot reload feature that immediately shows UI changes and makes the testing process easier.
• React Native supports over-the-air updates. It allows avoiding the App Store review process and deploys all JS code changes right to users’ devices Flutter can’t do this now.
• React Native has a larger community and, thus, a larger pool of developers if you looking for a remote freelancer or team. However, Flutter’s community is growing rapidly.

So, the key conclusion here is that both frameworks are good; your task is to figure out which one is better for your specific project. However, it still may feel a bit challenging to choose between Flutter vs React Native for app development.

If you need a fresh and yet professional outside perspective from the team with solid React Native and some Flutter experience, drop us a line. We’ll help to pick the right framework for your project and can prepare a React Native estimate for it!