React Native vs Flutter - A Detailed Comparison

About React Native and Flutter

What is React Native?

React Native is an open-source JavaScript framework for mobile app development that enables the development of multi-platform, real, and natively-rendered Android and iOS mobile apps using native UI components. Applications for React Native are written using JSX, a unique markup language combined with JavaScript.

React Native is based on Facebook's JavaScript library, React. However, unlike React, which is primarily used for building user interfaces for web browsers, React Native is specifically designed to target mobile platforms.

Many businesses, including major corporations such as Uber, Microsoft, and Facebook, have widely adopted React Native for their mobile application development needs. One of the key benefits of using React Native is its ability to use a single codebase for both iOS and Android platforms. This means that developers can write code once and use it on both platforms, rather than having to create separate code for each platform. This feature not only saves a considerable amount of time and effort but also makes the development process more efficient and cost-effective and many firms look to hire React Native developers.

What is Flutter?

Flutter was released in May, 2017 by Google and it enables users to create high-quality mobile, web, and desktop applications using a single codebase. It is an open-source mobile UI framework that uses the Dart programming language, which is optimized for building user interfaces. With Flutter, developers can create visually appealing, natively compiled applications that are highly performant.

Flutter is composed of two essential components:

Firstly, an SDK that provides various development tools necessary to build applications. It also includes tools to translate your code into machine code specific to iOS and Android platforms.

Secondly, a framework that consists of a UI library based on widgets. These widgets are pre-built and customizable UI elements such as buttons, text inputs, and sliders, among others, that you can tailor to fulfill your application's requirements.

The framework offers several powerful development tools, such as hot reload, that allow developers to quickly see the effects of code changes without the need to restart the application. Flutter's cross-platform capabilities and fast development cycle have made it a popular choice for developers looking to create applications for a wide range of industries, including finance, healthcare, and gaming. Overall, Flutter is a powerful and versatile framework that offers a robust set of tools for developers to create high-quality applications for multiple platforms.

Key Features

React Native - Key Features

Cross-platform compatibility: With React Native, developers can create mobile apps for both iOS and Android platforms using a single codebase, resulting in quicker development and consistent user experiences across different platforms.

Native components: An important reason for using React Native over WebView-based tools is the ability to attain 60 frames per second. React Native employs native components to provide high-performance user interfaces that feel like native apps and enhance app performance.

Third-party library support: The React Native framework has a vast library of third-party components and plugins that can be easily integrated into an app, making it simpler to add required features and functionalities.

Live reload: The built-in Live Reload feature of React Native allows developers to see the code changes in real-time, saving development time, improving efficiency and ensuring a fast development process.

Modular architecture: React Native's modular architecture allows developers to build reusable components, simplifying codebase maintenance and updates.

Large community support: React Native has a large and active community of developers who provide assistance, resources, and tools for building mobile apps, making it easy to find help and resources when required.

UI focused: Designing the user interface (UI) for mobile apps is a crucial factor during development, and React Native is a popular choice due to its focus on UI design. The framework is highly responsive and offers excellent rendering capabilities, making it a preferred option for creating mobile app UIs.

Cost Effective: The most significant advantage of React Native is that it eliminates the need to write separate code bases for multiple platforms. Its reusable code approach ensures that code written for one platform works seamlessly on others as well. This aspect of React Native makes it a cost-effective solution, enabling app development teams to save up to 40% on overall development costs.

Flutter - Key Features

Cross-platform development: Flutter allows developers to create applications for both iOS and Android platforms using a single codebase. This feature saves time and effort as developers do not have to create separate codebases for each platform.

Widgets: Flutter's widgets are the building blocks of the app's user interface, and they are highly customizable. The widgets are pre-built and can be modified to fit the requirements of the application. This feature saves time and effort for developers as they don't need to build the UI components from scratch.

Hot Reload: This feature of Flutter enables developers to make changes to the code and see the changes reflected immediately in the app while it's running. This feature can significantly increase development speed and efficiency.

Open-source: Flutter is an open-source framework, meaning that developers can contribute to the codebase and create plugins and packages to extend its functionality. 

High-performance: Flutter is designed for high performance, providing smooth and responsive user experiences. Flutter's high-performance is achieved through its use of a programming language called Dart, which compiles to native machine code.

Access to native features: Flutter provides access to native features of both iOS and Android platforms, such as camera, GPS, and more. This feature enables developers to create highly functional and engaging applications that can access device-specific features.

Performance Comparison

React Native Performance

React Native is known for its high performance in terms of speed and smoothness. This is mainly due to its use of native components, which enable it to create user interfaces that are both fast and responsive. React Native components are also designed to be highly optimized, resulting in minimal memory usage and improved app performance.

React Native also incorporates features such as Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation, which translates code into machine code at runtime, improving performance and reducing lag time. It also employs a virtual DOM (Document Object Model) that efficiently updates only the necessary components of an app, and minimizes the amount of work needed to render UI changes.

Additionally, React Native's Hot Reloading feature enables developers to instantly preview changes made to the codebase, without having to restart the entire app. This not only saves time but also ensures that the development process is smooth and efficient.

Overall, React Native's performance is highly regarded in the mobile app development community, with many developers choosing it over other frameworks due to its speed, smoothness, and overall performance capabilities.

Flutter Performance

Flutter is a framework known for its high performance and speed. This is achieved through several techniques and features, such as the use of the Dart language, which compiles to native machine code, resulting in faster app startup times and reduced memory usage.

Flutter's architecture is designed to enable smooth and fast animations & transitions, with the help of its own graphics engine, Skia, optimized for mobile devices. This provides a consistent and high frame rate for graphics rendering, delivering a smooth and responsive user experience.

Flutter's widgets are also built for high performance, optimized for fast rendering and updating, while still allowing for highly customizable UI components that can be tailored to specific needs.

Another feature contributing to Flutter's performance is its "Ahead of Time" (AOT) compilation, which compiles code ahead of time to reduce app launch and loading times.

In summary, Flutter's high performance is characterized by its speed and smoothness, which is achieved through the use of the Dart language, optimized graphics engine, highly customizable widgets, and AOT compilation.

Popularity over the years

React Native

In 2013, Jordan Walke, a developer at Facebook, made a significant breakthrough by discovering a way to use JavaScript for generating UI elements in iOS apps. This discovery sparked great interest and led to the organization of a Hackathon aimed at exploring the possibilities of using JavaScript, a traditionally web-based solution, for mobile development. As a result of this event, React Native came into existence.

React Native was released by Facebook in 2015 and gained immediate attention from developers who were looking for a better way to build mobile applications. It was developed based on React, a widely popular JavaScript library that was already in high demand at the time of its release.

In 2016, React Native continued to gain popularity and was adopted by many companies for their mobile application development needs. However, early versions of React Native had some performance issues, and the framework wasn't as stable as some other mobile app development solutions. Nevertheless, developers continued to use React Native because it offered benefits such as fast development cycles and cross-platform capabilities.

In 2017, React Native became more stable, and its performance improved significantly, making it a more attractive option for mobile app development. It was during this time that major companies, including Airbnb, Walmart, and Uber started using React Native for their mobile app development needs.

After that, React Native received major updates which brought significant improvements to the framework, including better performance and support for new features.

Ever since then, React Native has seen a steady increase in popularity over the years due to its cross-platform capabilities, fast development cycles, and frequent updates to improve performance and functionality. It is now one of the most widely used frameworks for building mobile applications, with a large and active developer community behind it.

Flutter

During the Mobile World Congress in February 2017, Google first introduced Flutter while it was still in its alpha stage and accessible to a limited number of developers.

After Google released Flutter's first stable version in May 2018, the framework became available to all developers. This led to a significant increase in its popularity as it became a practical option for developing production-level applications. Consequently, companies such as Alibaba, Philips Hue, and Reflectly started using Flutter to develop their apps.

Flutter experienced continued growth in popularity in 2019, and GitHub recognized it as the fastest-growing open-source project. During this time, companies such as BMW, Grab, and Tencent adopted Flutter for developing their applications. Moreover, Google launched Flutter for web, which enabled developers to create web applications using Flutter.

Flutter's popularity continued to rise in 2020 as it became the preferred choice for many developers, mainly due to its cross-platform compatibility, hot-reload feature, and user-friendly interface. As a result, companies such as Nubank, Realtor.com, and WeChat used Flutter to create their applications.

Flutter attained the position of the second most widely used cross-platform mobile development framework after React Native. Additionally, Google launched Flutter 2.0, which featured new capabilities like sound null safety, better performance, and support for desktop and embedded devices.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages of React Native

Time-saving: One of the main benefits of using React Native is that it saves developers time by allowing them to see changes they make to the application in real-time during the development stage, without the need for recompilation. This feature is especially valuable for Android developers who are familiar with the time-consuming process of recompiling applications after making changes.

Developer Experience: React Native offers developers a range of powerful tools that are integrated into the framework, providing a seamless development experience. These tools include intelligent debugging and error reporting capabilities, making it easier to troubleshoot and fix issues during the development process.

Developers can use the same debugging tools they are familiar with from Chrome or Safari for mobile development, which means they do not need to learn new tools for mobile development.

Text-Editor of your choice: Developers can use any text editor of their choice for JavaScript editing, as React Native does not limit them to specific development environments, such as Xcode for iOS or Android Studio for Android development.

Large community support: React Native has a large and active community of developers, which provides access to a wide range of resources and expertise, making it easier to troubleshoot issues and find solutions to problems.

One ecosystem: React Native allows developers to create versatile mobile applications without requiring in-depth knowledge of the specific ecosystems and programming languages of each operating system.

Fast refresh: The Fast Refresh feature in React Native enables developers to make changes to the application's user interface and update it to new versions without the need to rebuild the entire app. With this feature, changes are visible immediately, allowing developers to save time on compilation.

Disadvantages of React Native

Debugging: Debugging an application built with React Native can be a complex process that requires a deep understanding of how React Native generates code and the ability to decide how to respond to it.

Compatibility issues: Despite being used by top tech companies, it may come as a surprise that React Native is still in the beta phase. As a result, developers may encounter various issues with package compatibility or debugging tools. If your developers are not proficient in React Native, this could negatively impact your development process as they spend a considerable amount of time troubleshooting such issues.

Scalability:  React Native may face scalability issues when developing large, complex applications due to performance limitations, limited access to native APIs, compatibility issues, and large bundle size. It's important to consider these potential scalability issues when using React Native and plan accordingly to ensure optimal performance.

Steep Learning Curve: React Native may face scalability issues when developing large, complex applications due to performance limitations, limited access to native APIs, compatibility issues, and large bundle size. It's important to consider these potential scalability issues when using React Native and plan accordingly to ensure optimal performance.

Advantages of Flutter

Cross-Platform Compatibility: Flutter enables developers to create apps that work seamlessly on various platforms, such as iOS, Android, web, and desktop, which reduces development time and costs by using a single codebase.

Rapid Development: Flutter's "hot-reload" feature enables developers to see code changes in real-time, saving time by eliminating the need to rebuild the entire app.

Customizable Widgets: Flutter provides customizable widgets that enable developers to create unique and visually appealing user interfaces that can be customized for different platforms.

Growing Community: Flutter has a rapidly growing community of developers and contributors that provide resources and support to help developers learn and use Flutter more effectively, constantly improving and expanding its features and functionalities.

Disadvantages of Flutter

Limited Libraries: Although Flutter has a vast collection of built-in widgets and libraries, it still lacks some important libraries compared to other popular frameworks. This may restrict developers from including certain features in their apps.

Steep Learning Curve: Flutter has a unique architecture and requires developers to learn Dart programming language. This can take some time to master, especially for developers who are not familiar with object-oriented programming.

Limited Native Functionality: Flutter's cross-platform compatibility has certain limitations as it may not have access to all the native features and functions that are available on each platform. This may restrict the ability to create apps with native-like functionality on certain platforms.

Large File Sizes: Flutter apps can have larger file sizes compared to other frameworks due to the inclusion of many widgets and libraries. This can result in slower downloads and take up more storage space on users' devices.

Use Cases

React Native - Use Cases

Cross-platform compatibility: With React Native, developers can create mobile apps for both iOS and Android platforms using a single codebase, resulting in quicker development and consistent user experiences across different platforms.

Native components: An important reason for using React Native over WebView-based tools is the ability to attain 60 frames per second. React Native employs native components to provide high-performance user interfaces that feel like native apps and enhance app performance.

Third-party library support: The React Native framework has a vast library of third-party components and plugins that can be easily integrated into an app, making it simpler to add required features and functionalities.

Live reload: The built-in Live Reload feature of React Native allows developers to see the code changes in real-time, saving development time, improving efficiency and ensuring a fast development process.

Modular architecture: React Native's modular architecture allows developers to build reusable components, simplifying codebase maintenance and updates.

Large community support: React Native has a large and active community of developers who provide assistance, resources, and tools for building mobile apps, making it easy to find help and resources when required.

UI focused: Designing the user interface (UI) for mobile apps is a crucial factor during development, and React Native is a popular choice due to its focus on UI design. The framework is highly responsive and offers excellent rendering capabilities, making it a preferred option for creating mobile app UIs.

Cost Effective: The most significant advantage of React Native is that it eliminates the need to write separate code bases for multiple platforms. Its reusable code approach ensures that code written for one platform works seamlessly on others as well. This aspect of React Native makes it a cost-effective solution, enabling app development teams to save up to 40% on overall development costs.

Flutter - Use Cases

Cross-platform development: Flutter allows developers to create applications for both iOS and Android platforms using a single codebase. This feature saves time and effort as developers do not have to create separate codebases for each platform.

Widgets: Flutter's widgets are the building blocks of the app's user interface, and they are highly customizable. The widgets are pre-built and can be modified to fit the requirements of the application. This feature saves time and effort for developers as they don't need to build the UI components from scratch.

Hot Reload: This feature of Flutter enables developers to make changes to the code and see the changes reflected immediately in the app while it's running. This feature can significantly increase development speed and efficiency.

Open-source: Flutter is an open-source framework, meaning that developers can contribute to the codebase and create plugins and packages to extend its functionality. 

High-performance: Flutter is designed for high performance, providing smooth and responsive user experiences. Flutter's high-performance is achieved through its use of a programming language called Dart, which compiles to native machine code.

Access to native features: Flutter provides access to native features of both iOS and Android platforms, such as camera, GPS, and more. This feature enables developers to create highly functional and engaging applications that can access device-specific features.

Which is better - React Native or Flutter

Both React Native and Flutter have emerged as powerful cross-platform mobile app development technologies. React Native offers the advantage of a large and active community, along with a wide range of third-party libraries and components. On the other hand, Flutter excels in delivering highly polished and visually appealing user interfaces.

Regarding interdependence, it's important to note that React Native and Flutter are independent technologies. They have their own ecosystems, tools, and frameworks. While they serve a similar purpose, developers can choose either technology based on their specific requirements and preferences.

Ultimately, the decision between React Native and Flutter depends on factors such as project complexity, team expertise, performance needs, and development timelines.