React Native vs Ionic Explained: A Step-by-Step Evaluation

Take a look at eye-opening statistics of the number of smartphone users worldwide from 2014 to 2020.

Image Credit: Statista

The number of smartphone users is predicted to grow by 2.87 billion in 2020. As you can see above, the number is expected to surpass the five billion mark by 2019.

Mobile app development is a talk of the town everywhere and the number of mobile apps is increasing at a rapid pace in app stores. More and more organizations are adopting mobility and capitalizing on mission-critical mobile apps to expand the business. In order to meet the ever-changing business needs, there is a multitude of technologies and platforms are being introduced frequently. It also becomes a point of debate to choose the right technology to accomplish objectives.

Here, in this article, we will discuss the most popular frameworks – React Native and Ionic to help you understand the primary differences between these two frameworks along with their key features and drawbacks.

Before we start, here’s something important you should consider. Ionic is a framework for hybrid mobile app development and React Native is a cross-platform framework to build native apps.

Native App vs Hybrid App: A Popular Debate

Native apps are built in a specific language for a specific platform. For example, when you write code in Objective C for the iOS platform or use Java for Android, then the application is called a native app. The main advantage of native app development is superior performance.  Contradictory to this, hybrid applications are web applications that use web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to develop an application. To provide native experience and access native features of Android, iOS, or any other platform, it uses PhoneGap/Cordova platforms.

Which One Should You Choose: Ionic or React Native?

Let’s explore each framework in detail so you can easily decide when to use which framework.

Ionic Framework: Better Performance And Elegant Design

Ionic, launched 5 years ago by Drifty.co, is a standard framework for hybrid mobile app development. It allows web developers to build apps for the majority of the platforms using a single code base. It leverages web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and platforms like PhoneGap/Cordova to deliver the native-like experience.

It is one of the widely popular frameworks to build feature-rich, modern and elegant apps.

React Native Framework: Build Native Apps Using React

Developed by the Facebook community, React Native is a cross-platform framework based on JavaScript technology. It enables developers to build enhanced and native-like apps using a single code base. The aim of this framework is to build first-rate native application experiences using JavaScript and React.

Facebook uses React Native development most in various apps and it has a dedicated community to make React Native a more advanced tool.

What Are The Key Difference – Ionic vs React Native?

• Technology Stack:

Ionic offers complete SDK to build hybrid apps, while the goal of React Native is to leverage the “learn once, write anywhere” theory. React Native adopts the native behavior and standards of the platforms and hence, gives a seamless native experience. Here, the advantage is that it gives a complete focus on user interfaces with the help of native UI components.

If we talk about Ionic, it embraces the power of classic web technologies to build multi-functional, multi-platform apps with the minimum code base. Furthermore, it is built on top of Angular (don’t confuse as Ionic 2 is a complete rewrite of the original Ionic framework).

So, if you are familiar with Angular, it is comfortable for you to start with an Ionic framework. It is also loaded with many built-in components which make development easier, faster, and smoother.

This framework has thousands of mobile apps built using Ionic so far. Ionic app development has grown quite a lot recently and many companies are choosing Ionic to build their apps.

• Performance:

As React Native delivers an experience as close as to native, developers who are obsessed with native-feeling, choose React Native over Ionic. Since it aims to provide a closer native appearance, you need to modify some platform-specific components.
React is a more stable framework and also ideal for large-scale applications. It is intended to provide great performance and responsiveness which requires a comparatively higher budget.

On the other side, Ionic is all about native browser apps using mobile-optimized HTML, CSS, and JS components. It offers a hybrid approach to app development and ideal for the rapid prototyping of an app. It accomplishes modern needs in such a manner that reflects write once, runs anywhere software paradigm.

Sometimes, there could be performance issues as there are a lot of callbacks to the native code involved, plus, you need to download various plugins to access native features.

• Plugins and Community:

There is a huge number of plugins available for React Native. In addition, React Native has a wide community which is very helpful to find important information, updates, and solutions to solve your issues. There’s also a plugin to utilize PhoneGap/Cordova plugins which help you access many mature plugins from the other communities.
For Ionic, there is also an established and grown-up community that can assist you in solving your issues. A lot of PhoneGap/Cordova plugins are being used to obtain native features.

• Platforms:

As the nature of both these frameworks is cross-platform, they both support Android or iOS. Ionic 2 supports the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) as a part of its expansion and that’s an additional benefit point when you use Ionic.

React Native vs Ionic – Tabular Comparison