Flutter vs. React Native: A Detailed Comparison for App Development in 2024

Choosing the right framework for your cross-platform mobile app can be a tough decision. Both Flutter Vs React Native offer compelling features and have earned their place in the development world. This detailed comparison will help you weigh their strengths and weaknesses to make the best choice for your project. Dive into the pros and cons of developing mobile apps in React Native and Flutter to learn more about the platform suited best for your unique requirements.

What are cross-platform app development frameworks? 

In the rapidly evolving world driven by digital solutions, the popularity of smartphones has made cross-platform app development a necessity for the propagation of your brand and its utilization across a wider demographic of users. Gone are the days of developing apps solely based on a singular unique platform, as newer app development frameworks support multiple platforms natively, making your app more versatile and consistent across iOS and Android. This is why almost half of all mobile apps in 2023 were made using cross-platform frameworks. 

Why should you choose the right platform? 

While these technologies continue to improve, the pragmatic implementation of the app and its development cycle largely depend upon your choice of framework. This is why it is paramount for any digital service provider to choose the right platform before embarking on their journey of app development. An informed comparison and selection between such frameworks will signify the quality of your finalized application, its consistency across platforms, and its overall development time and cost.  

Flutter VS React Native – A detailed overview 

Two of the most popular choices in this segment are Flutter vs React Native, known for their reliability and their continual improvement over time to offer better versatility, tighter integration with the OS, and more consistency across different platforms.

In an ideal world, the choice between these two frameworks would be very easy and binary, but the reality is that both platforms offer their own pros and cons in terms of their utilization and execution. Both are powerful tools capable of building amazing cross-platform applications, but carry significant differences against each other that make them suitable for specific use cases and needs.

This is why it is integral to choose the right framework that suits your unique needs and priorities to ensure that you don’t encounter any issues in the future in terms of scalability, maintenance, and uniformity. Choosing between Flutter VS React Native in 2024 will directly decide upon your future strategy and the availability of choices in terms of the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of your application. 

What is Flutter and how has it innovated over existing frameworks? 

Known for its intuitive UI-oriented object-based programming, Flutter is the new kid on the block that has been steadily rising in popularity among developers according to the latest Stack overflow survey and Statista. Its user interface is just as intuitive as the mobile apps it can help create for developers, with smooth fluid animations, incredible visual effects, and a consistent native-like experience.

Google developed Flutter to have a shorter learning curve, making it a great choice for somebody starting fresh on their journey of cross-platform app development, in search of an intuitive and helpful framework to assist them

Popular features and benefits of Flutter:- 

Some of Flutter’s most popular features are:- 

• Hot Reload: An almost magical feature built into Flutter is the ability to instantly reflect your code changes in the app. Forget about waiting for long compile times, just write your code and see it live. This makes development incredibly fast and efficient.

• Beautiful UI: Flutter’s built-in widgets and animation capabilities are a joy to work with. This makes for a visually stunning UI that truly feels native, without relying on unnecessary third-party libraries.

• Dart: While it’s a newer language, Dart is simple, clean, and powerful. This makes the language easy to learn and ideal for a new developer to build modern, performant applications.

• Single Codebase: This is the holy grail of cross-platform development. One free and open-source codebase for both iOS and Android means fewer developers, faster development cycles, and easier maintenance.

• Performance: Flutter compiles to native code, giving you a smooth, responsive user experience. It’s a great choice for apps that demand high performance.

• Rendering Engine: Flutter integrates its own high-performance rendering engine, enabling higher performance and highly customizable dedicated widgets. 

What is React Native and why is it still popular? 

Facebook’s alternative cross-platform app development framework is the classic React Native, a seasoned veteran that boasts a large community of passionate developers and an extensive library of dedicated components. The main advantage of React Native is that it uses Javascript as the basis of its functioning, allowing a large number of developers already familiar with this age-old language to immediately pick up and use React Native.

This makes it a popular choice among existing developers fluent in Javascript aspiring to build apps for both iOS and Android through a singular codebase. 

Popular features and benefits of React Native:- 

Some of Flutter’s most popular features are:- 

• JavaScript adoption: React Native leverages JavaScript, making a lower learning curve for developers with existing web development experience. 

• Dedicated Community: React Native carries a massive and vibrant community, offering an unparalleled wealth of resources, libraries, and existing support. This means that finding solutions and assistance to problems is easier considering extensive community-run forums and discussions surrounding the platform.

• Mature Ecosystem: The React Native ecosystem is vintage and prestigious, with a vast collection of pre-built components and libraries, allowing developers to quickly add features and functionality to their apps.

• Native Performance: React Native bridges the gap between JavaScript and native components, resulting in apps that feel and perform like native apps.

Comparing Flutter versus React Native in terms of their popularity (2024)

It’s hard to exactly quantify the popularity of these two platforms in terms of what developers believe to be better in every manner, as each developer will choose to adopt their preferred framework based on fluctuating demographics like their experience in Javascript, localized popularity in their country, and their independent use-case. That being said, we can deduce from statistical analysis of developers spread across the globe to check the framework’s overall adoption and gain a macro understanding of which platform is typically prone to be utilized on average in a commercial mobile app development project. 

Flutter VS React Native 2024 (Google Trends)

Google Trends showcases a steady rise in the popularity of Flutter as it is more frequently searched globally and has steadily gained traction in the last two years. This showcases the increased interest in Flutter in comparison to React Native among both technical and non-technical user bases. 

(Source)

The yearly survey report by Stack Overflow showcases how the popularity of both React Native and Flutter changes over time, particularly amongst seasoned developers. This helps us analyze the real-life utilization of both frameworks and their technical adoption across the globe. Pitting React Native against Flutter in the latest Stack Overflow survey shows that Flutter still tops React Native according to responses from over 90k developers.  

Flutter VS React Native and other cross-platform mobile frameworks (Statista)

Another developer survey shows how the popularity of Flutter VS React Native changed over the years and their comparison to other prominent cross-platform mobile frameworks. This shows Flutter’s incredible growth over four years recently, alongside the decline in the popularity of React Native and other frameworks, signifying the dominance of Flutter in the space and its popularity.

(Source)

Which is better in 2024? Flutter VS React Native

Pros and Cons of Flutter

We can see that even though Flutter is clearly becoming a popular choice among developers, both Flutter Vs React Native carry their own benefits and drawbacks. While Flutter is more UI-centric and innovative in its widget customization through a dedicated engine, it is relatively new and thus has weaker community support. This forces the need for more custom iPhone App development and widget designing as Flutter is still expanding its third-party libraries. 

Advantages of Flutter

• Cross-platform development: Build for iOS, Android, web, and desktop with one codebase.
• Fast development: Hot reload lets you see changes instantly, speeding up development.
• Beautiful UI: Rich, customizable widgets for unique and appealing designs.
• Native features: Access device functionalities for a smooth user experience.
• Open-source and free: No licensing fees for commercial use.
• Faster time-to-market: Get your app launched quicker with efficient development.
• Great for MVPs: Build prototypes quickly to validate your app concept.

Disadvantages of Flutter

• New technology: Still evolving, with some features under development.
• Larger app size: This can be an issue for users with limited storage.
• Fewer third-party libraries: This may require more custom development for specific features.
• Learning curve for devs: Dart is less common than JavaScript used in React Native.
• Limited corporate adoption: Finding Flutter developers might be more difficult.
• Potential performance trade-offs: These may not always match purely native apps.

Pros and Cons of React Native 

Meanwhile, React Native is the more mature and nuanced platform built on the well-known Javascript foundation that makes it readily available to a large corpus of developers. But its performance is subpar due to JavaScript bridging and it proves to be more challenging and cumbersome in its implementation and customization of UI. React Native is also not as seamless as Flutter in terms of its discrepancies between Android and iOS, causing a reduction in consistency. 

Here’s a quick rundown of React Native’s strengths and weaknesses:

Advantages:

• Faster Development: React Native’s code reusability and hot reloading features significantly speed up the development process compared to building separate native apps.
• Code Reusability: A large portion of your codebase can be shared between iOS and Android apps, reducing development time and costs.
• Native-like Performance: React Native apps can achieve performance close to native apps, delivering a smooth user experience.
• Large Community: React Native boasts a vast and active developer community, providing ample resources, support, and libraries.
• Third-party Library Support: The extensive ecosystem of third-party libraries simplifies development by offering pre-built components and functionalities.
• Hot Reloading: Similar to Flutter, hot reloading allows for near-instantaneous updates to the app during development, boosting productivity.

Disadvantages:

• Limited Native Features: Accessing some device-specific functionalities might require writing native code, increasing development complexity.
• Debugging Challenges: Debugging issues can be more intricate in React Native compared to purely native development.
• Not All-Encompassing: React Native might not be ideal for apps heavily reliant on unique native features or extremely high-performance requirements.
• Performance Considerations: While generally good, performance can be a concern for complex apps or those with intricate animations.
• Security Concerns: Security vulnerabilities might arise if not addressed properly during development, requiring extra vigilance.

Technology Stack

Flutter vs. React Native: Tech Stack Showdown

Both Flutter and React Native are popular choices for cross-platform mobile app development, but they take different approaches under the hood. Here’s a breakdown of their key tech stacks:

Language:

• Flutter: Uses Dart, a modern, object-oriented language with a syntax similar to Java or Kotlin.
• React Native: Leverages JavaScript, a widely used language for web development, allowing for code reusability with existing web projects.

UI Rendering:

• Flutter: Employs its high-performance rendering engine, resulting in smooth animations and a native-like feel. It compiles code Ahead-of-Time (AOT) for faster execution.
• React Native: Relies on native UI components for each platform (Android and iOS) for a more platform-specific look. It uses Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation.

Development Experience:

• Flutter: Offers a rich set of widgets and a strong focus on hot reload, enabling rapid development cycles. IDE support might be limited compared to React Native.
• React Native: Benefits from a vast JavaScript ecosystem and a wider range of IDEs. However, hot reloading might be slower than Flutter.

Here’s a table summarizing the key points:

Feature	Flutter	React Native
Language	Dart	JavaScript
UI Rendering	Custom Engine (AOT)	Native Components (JIT)
Development Experience	Hot Reload, Focused Widgets	Larger Developer Community, More IDE Support

Comparing Flutter Vs React Native according to their features

Pitting Flutter against React Native, we can see the following number of vital differences in both its interface and overall product output:

Flutter	React Native
Flutter is intuitive and easy to understand.	React Native is a bit limiting and harder to learn
Unique and highly customizable widgets with a custom rendering engine	Uses Native UI widgets for higher consistency and allows deeper improvements
Built for cross-platform development, reducing development time with a dedicated library of prebuilt UI components	Potentially slower development cycle due to platform-specific tuning required for an error-free deployment
Requires the knowledge of proprietary Dart language	Requires the knowledge of Javascript, whichis more widely adopted
Faster performance but significantly larger file sizes	Slower performance due to Java bridging restrictions

Prominent mobile applications currently using Flutter in 2024 

Here are some of the most popular mobile applications today using Flutter as its framework for its development:- 

1. Amazon

E-commerce giant Amazon relies on Flutter and its intricate UI customization options to keep itself updated against other competing platforms. 

2. Universal Studios

The highly customizable widgets presented by Flutter allow Universal Studios to create next-gen experiences for its users.

3. Google Pay

The entire suite of Google apps, including Maps, Youtube, and Google Pay/Wallet are powered by Flutter, with security-intensive apps like Google Pay utilizing advanced security encryption measures offered by the Flutter framework. 

Prominent mobile applications currently using React Native in 2024 

Here are some prominent applications using React Native for their development:-

1. Instagram 

Instagram uses the advanced library of existing widgets and compatibility offered by React Native to allow better optimization of its messaging and social-sharing utilities. 

2. Discord

New-age messaging app Discord, popular among teenagers and gamers, uses innovative widgets and customizable UI of React Native to provide a fresh user experience. 

3.  Tesla

Car management and bleeding edge auto-drive features available through class-leading security encryption are the requirements being fulfilled by React Native for Tesla and their mobile-app development needs across both iOS and Android. 

To know more about the development journey of such apps, check out our portfolio here!

Development Cost between Flutter and React Native in 2024

Comparing average developer cost in the US between Flutter and React Native

While both Flutter and React Native are free and open source, the biggest chunk of your mobile app development budget will likely be spent on developer salaries. If you’re planning to build a permanent team, here is a general idea of the salary ranges for Flutter and React Native developers in the USA in 2024:- 

Comparing hourly rates of developers in the USA, Asia, and Eastern Europe

A great way to cut costs in terms of developer salary within both Flutter and React Native App development cycles is hiring developers for projects at an hourly rate. According to Upwork, here are the rates across multiple geographical markets in 2024:- 

Suppose you are unsure about your development needs or require an expert developer for your next project at competitive rates. In that case, NectarBits provides both Flutter and React Native developers for your unique needs!

How to Choose the right platform for your needs between Flutter and React Native

Ultimately, both Flutter and React Native are powerful tools for building amazing cross-platform apps. The key is to choose the right tool for the job, considering your project’s unique requirements and your team’s skillset. Pitting Flutter vs React Native in 2024 forces the comparison between Flutter App Development and react native app development based on a variety of different parameters. 

While small to medium-sized projects can avail of either of these platforms, complex projects require a framework that can keep up with their requirements. The expertise of the programming language (Dart VS JavaScript) within the team and the importance of pre-existing widgets and community support are additional parameters that can dictate the right platform for your unique needs and IOS Android App development cycle. 

Choose Flutter if:	Choose React Native if:
You need a truly native-like experience with smooth animations and stunning visuals.	You have a large team with existing JavaScript expertise.
You are comfortable with Dart or want to learn a new language with a strong emphasis on simplicity.	You need a faster development speed for your projects.
You are developing a UI-intensive app with custom designs and animations.	You need access to a vast library of pre-built components and modules.

Did you find this comparison interesting? Check out another framework comparison of Angular VS React here!

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