Ionic and Flutter are the technologies for building cross-platform apps. Flutter’s custom approach contrasts with Ionic’s standard web-based approach.
Flutter and Ionic sharing a similar mission and vision, our thoughts about how to do it could not be more different.
Flutter and Ionic features Comparison Chart:
Basic features of both flutter and ionic are compared as below by chart:
| Flutter | Ionic | |
| Runtime | Custom graphics engine | Web browser |
| Languages | Dart | HTML, CSS, JavaScript |
| Off-line access | Yes | Yes |
| UI elements | Proprietary Widgets | Standards-based Web Components |
| Web Performance | Poor | Excellent |
| Mobile Performance | Excellent | Poor |
| Native API access | Native plug-in library, using Flutter native packages | Native plug-in library, using Cordova and Capacitor |
| Deployment Options | Web, Mobile, Desktop | Web, Mobile, Desktop, PWA
|
Ionic:
The ionic framework can build mobile applications for a cross-platform like Android or iOS. Ionic development done by Drift Community. It is written with JavaScript and released in 2013. It gives a library of mobile and desktop-optimized CSS, HTML component for creating mostly intuitive and interactive apps. Ionic web performance is poor but mobile performance is excellent.
It has features like UI components and a rich library of front-end building blocks. That permits the user to develop and create a high- performance, beautiful design and progressive mobile applications with scripting languages like CSS, HTML and JavaScript.
Advantages of Ionic
- It’s Angular JS
- Hybrid mobile
- Allows for quick prototyping
Disadvantages of Ionic
- Not able to game development
- Not suitable for UI intensive or high-performance apps
Flutter:
Flutter is a mobile app Software development kit to help the designer and developer to build modern mobile apps for Android and iOS. Flutter development done by Google and the community. It is written with Dart, C, C++ released in 2017. Flutter can compare with many cross-platform app development tools with growing in popularity. Flutter web performance is excellence but mobile performance is good.
It develops mobile applications using a single code Dart. It is integrated with inbuilt Swift and Objective C on iOS and Java Code on Android.
Advantages of Flutter
- Performance
- Hot Reload
- Compiled into Native C
- Backed by Google
Disadvantages of Flutter
- Absence of community support
- Need to learn Dart
- Absence of friendly documentation
- Absence of promotion
In the battle of Ionic vs. Flutter Ionic is the winner.
If you go with hybrid applications, you should go with Ionic. On the other side, you are not emphasizing on building web applications, you should not go with Flutter.
Terms to know before selecting Flutter or Ionic
Selection of flutter or ionic depends upon the nature of the projects Both Flutter and ionic are great development solution, but consider below terms before selecting platform:
Performance
In some animations, flutter performance is better while developing consumer app Ionic performance is better.
While delivering app over the web, App size is more important. As noted above, Ionic uses the standard browser primitives and runtime, so the app size is usually very small. Flutter need a large amount of code for primary apps because you’re shipping all of that runtime even the browser has primitives available for all of it. Thus, flutter gives rank highly in search engine result pages with Google’s standard for a progressive web app.
Just think, Performance almost not depends on which platform or framework you choose but always comes with how you write your code,
Code Portability
Flutter’s web implementation will likely never work for apps that require snappy performance and fast load times. Given that Ionic is built on the web-based standards, we think it’s better-best Ionic the advantage when it comes to the targeting web, mobile and the desktop.
Knowledge and Skills:
Ionic is a JavaScript-based framework while Flutter is not. For being flutter developer you may know language called Dart.
If you know JS you can work on many platforms to build mobile and web app development. Dart features have their constraints. Who knows Dart can only work for flutter empowered applications.
For being a flutter developer you need to learn ‘flutter ways’ of things. On the other side if you want to be an Ionic developer you don’t need to know ‘Ionic ways’ of things. You need to learn code JS with CSS to build apps.
User Interface:
Both Flutter and Ionic update the design of their UI elements automatically. The selection of UI depends upon the material design, Platform the app is running on and Cupertino for iOS. Flutter and ionic both platforms allow you to access native APIs and platform services.
Sustainability:
Ionic has more community support than Flutter. JS specialist makeup 70% of development while Flutter specialist makeup less than 2%.
Ionic uses more popular technologies than flutter so Ionic is more sustainable than flutter.
Required Knowledge
Flutter uses specific software development methodologies so it is selected by programmers who are ready to learn new master skills and know exactly what they want from SDK.
While Ionic is easy to learn, if anyone who knows basic development principles they also can start easily.
Conclusion
After reading article you can see all features of ionic and flutter so you can select any SDK as per your need. Ionic has easy features as compare to flutter. We can say in comparision of ionic and flutter we can select ionic. The reason behind its priority is open web technologies, while Flutter is limited to Dart. After all select Ionic and Flutter as per your business needs.
Ionic’s first principle is using the embracing open standards and web platform. Ionic can go with tools and languages of the web and framework designed to deliver high performance on desktop, mobile and particularly the web.
Flutter, on opposite side, has chosen to create a self-contained ecosystem that is struggling with the common toolsets, languages and standards for development.
Several factors such as time, budget and application size will play a role when you have to decide framework for your cross-platform app development.
