Top 11 React Native Alternatives to Look For

For those who wish to leverage cross-platform competencies to a global audience, React Native development is the proper selection. React Native development is a preferred choice for today’s businesses as it saves cost and time by delivering native experiences using a single codebase for various platforms.

Supported by Facebook, it empowers developers to share optimal codebases across platforms with faster development, lesser costs, and simple ways of debugging. But just like any other popular technology, React Native has its share of limitations like compatibility issues, performance issues, etc. That is where React Native alternatives come into play.

This article focuses on the popular alternatives to React Native that can be implemented. Before that, let us have a quick glance at what React Native is.

What is React Native?

React Native believes in ‘Learn once, write anywhere’. React Native combines the best parts of native development with React, a best-in-class JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

React Native is widely benefited by recognized companies and brands to develop cross-platform and native-like apps. It showcases many advantages such as cost-efficiency, flexibility, performance, and code reusability. It empowers developers to create high-quality applications on a native platform based on React and JS.

Facebook has been leveraging React Native in various production applications. React Native is open source, easy to use and offers simplified UI development with cross-platform compatibility.

Key Features of React Native

• Code reusability with accelerated development
• Attractive user interface
• Faster time to market
• Open source, Hot Reloading
• Cost and time savings
• Native-like performance and feel
• Support for third-party libraries
• NPM for installation

11 Best React Native Alternatives (Competitors) to Know

React Native is good as a mobile app development framework there are other tools that act as ideal React Native alternative. We must consider different factors while looking for React Native competitors such as ease of use, reliability, scalability, availability of skilled resources, budget estimates, project deadlines, etc.

Below listed are the React Native competitors that can play the role of an effective alternative to React Native:

• Flutter
• Xamarin
• Ionic
• Apache Cordova
• jQuery Mobile
• Bootstrap
• Swift
• Framework7
• NativeScript
• Onsen UI
• React Navigation

Flutter:

Powered by Google, Flutter is an open-source UI framework to build native-like, flexible, and graphically enhanced cross-platform apps for web, mobile, and desktop using a single codebase. It is created with Dart, an object-oriented language. Flutter has been rising in popularity over the years. There are an enriched set of customizable widgets that can help in the creation of high-performing apps.

As an effective mobile app development framework and an ideal alternative to React Native, Flutter is the fastest-growing framework from Google to create apps for almost any platform. It allows developers to create a beautiful, fast, and secure app for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. Its fast development, hot reload, and native-like feel has made it a popular technology for mobile app development.

Xamarin:

Xamarin, as one of the best React Native alternatives, is a known cross-platform mobile app development technology that is powered by Microsoft. It makes use of the C# programming language and .NET framework. It empowers programmers to create apps for Android, iOS, and Windows platforms through a single codebase. There is an enriched set of pre-designed UI controls that can be leveraged to create the native user interface.

Xamarin offers great support for smart devices like Android Wear, Apple Watch, etc. It offers native multiplatform support, a faster development cycle, empowers features of Shared App Logic, and has a wide range of Component Store that allows for the exchange of components. Code reusability, easy maintenance, security, and stability are some of its key features.

Ionic:

Ionic is a top choice for building high-quality hybrid mobile apps. Ionic is an open-source mobile UI toolkit for developing cross-platform hybrid apps. It is built on AngularJS and Apache Cordova and now supports other JavaScript frameworks like Vue, React, Angular, etc. It is widely used for building high-quality, best-in-class PWAs combining the best of mobile and web to deliver superior experiences.

As a React Native alternative, it creates mobile, web, and desktop apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There are several plug-ins and pre-designed components that help in creating applications. Some of its salient features are faster time to market, native platform support, a single code base for multiple platforms, easy access to third-party code, and reduced cost and time.

Apache Cordova:

Initially known as PhoneGap, Apache Cordova is a leading mobile app development framework that is considered a significant React Native competitor. It assists developers in creating mobile applications with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Creating cross-platform apps is done through the Command Line Interface (CLI). The pre-created plug-ins and UI components help in offering features that can avail enhanced user interface and navigation.

It is easy to use and does not require too much time for application creation. It can be leveraged in different platforms like Windows, Blackberry, Ubuntu, etc. There is flexibility to create apps without the need to learn newer languages. It also offers multiple community add-ons that offer many libraries and frameworks. It behaves as a container that is accountable for linking web applications with native mobile functionalities.

jQuery Mobile:

jQuery Mobile is one of the popular alternatives to React Native that acts as an effective open-source JavaScript library for creating cross platforms mobile apps and websites. As an HTML-based user interface system, it is well known for its ease of use and fast implementation of different features like animations, AJAX, DOM manipulation, etc. It is a touch-optimized web framework that is ideal for creating responsive apps for different devices.

It is based on the ‘write less, do more’ jargon. Some of the reasons why jQuery Mobile is apt for developing mobile applications are its simplicity, flexibility and usability, support for high-end and low-end devices, support for user-friendly inputs, speed because of its lightweight size, responsiveness, theming and UI widgets, unified user interface system across all popular mobile platforms.

Bootstrap:

Bootstrap is a leading React Native alternative that is empowered to offer responsive development of mobile-first apps, webpages, websites, and Progressive Web Applications (PWA). It possesses the fundamentals of responsive web development, such that code must be inserted in a pre-built grid system. It is a comprehensive toolkit that utilizes the capabilities of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

It is easy, to begin with, and is easily customizable. Some of its characteristics include browser compatibility, mobile friendliness, simple integration, LESS and CSS files, extensive list of components, bundled JavaScript plug-ins, a great grid system, and easy-to-prevent repetition amongst multiple projects.

Also Read: Bootstrap Alternatives: 25 Best Alternatives To Bootstrap

Swift:

Swift is an able and intuitive programming language for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS. Composing Swift code is collaborative and fun, the syntax is crisp yet expressive, and Swift comprises of robust features developers love. It encourages developers to create their own iOS-powered devices.

It is an advanced, secure, and high-performance language that is easy to write apps and fit for native iOS app development. Its fast and natural programming style with simple maintainability and readability makes it a developer’s delight. It has an expressive syntax with reformed features like simplistic syntax, compatibility with Objective-C, multiple return values, functional programming patterns, and package manager.

Framework7:

Framework7 is a free, open-source React Native alternative that is apt for developing iOS, Android, desktop, or web apps with a native look. It also works well as an effective prototyping tool. You can create apps for any type of platform with its attractive user interface elements. You can even create native desktop apps by integrating it with other tools.

Being an easy-to-use tool, it is fast with an inbuilt FastClick library. Because of its inbuilt grid system layout, elements can be arranged in a responsive manner. It is completely dynamic and showcases high-performance animation capabilities. It has many pre-designed widgets and inbuilt helper libraries.

NativeScript:

As one of the well-known React Native alternatives, NativeScript offers in-depth integration with JavaScript frameworks like Angular, and Vue for lessening the learning curve. Developers can reuse their web skills for the creation of native mobile apps. There is a huge code-sharing facility between mobile platforms and web apps.

It is an open-source technology that is a JIT-compiled framework and can execute on JS virtual machine. It makes use of V8 engine runtime for both platforms – Android and iOS. It lets developers create web and mobile apps from a single codebase. It offers you a facility to access native APIs from JavaScript directly.

Onsen UI:

Onsen UI is an open-source UI framework that offers a variety of components like tabs, side menu, stack navigation, lists, forms etc. It also offers iOS and Android Material design support. It is based on Apache Cordova and makes use of web technologies like HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript for the creation of mobile apps.

It is easy to create native-feeling Progressive Web Apps, hybrid apps, and mobile apps with this framework. It offers a grid system to arrange elements in the screen that divides into rows and columns. It is an easy-to-learn technology that is used along with AngularJS, but it is also possible to use jQuery or any other framework.

React Navigation:

React Navigation is an easy-to-use framework that offers inbuilt navigators for a seamless experience. There are components for iOS and Android that offer a platform-specific look and feel with seamless animations and gestures. It is totally customizable and offers extensibility with all platforms.

It has a native stack navigator that offers a way for your application to transition between screens and manage navigation history. It is a standalone library that lets you implement navigation functionality in a React Native application. It is written in JavaScript and creates subsets of the navigation APIs.

Winding Up

Looking at the top React Native alternatives, as mentioned above, it seems like it is a tough choice to make. There are different parameters that must be ascertained while choosing the apt React Native alternative. Based on that, the right choice can be done in consultation with an experienced IT partner.

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