Flutter and Ionic are the two leading technologies used to build mobile applications for both iOS and Android platforms. They allow developers to quickly prototype and publish compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop with one programing language and single codebase. Both frameworks have their benefits, so the organization's better choice depends on the specific requirements and goals. In this section, we are going to compare the differences between Flutter and Ionic frameworks based on the various parameters. Before making a comparison, we are going to discuss in brief about these technologies.

What is Flutter?

Flutter is a cross-platform UI toolkit that allows us to create fast, beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop using Dart programming languages. It builds the app with one programing language and a single codebase. It is free and open-source. Google initially developed it in May 2017 and now manages by an ECMA standard. It is a growing technology in popularity to deliver excellent native experiences.

Google introduced it as an SDK (software development kit) to create modern mobile apps for iOS and Android. If we use Android Studio, it is integrated with inbuilt Java and Objective C and Swift on iOS.

Advantages or Pros of Flutter

The pros of Flutter technology are listed below.

• It is backed by Google.
• It supports the Hot-Reload feature that makes the app development process extremely fast. The Hot-Reload feature reflected the modified code as soon as the alterations are made.
• It reduces the time and effort of testing because of the cross-platform feature. This feature allows the testers not to run the same set of tests on different platforms for the same app.
• It has an excellent user interface because it uses a design-centric widget, high-development tools, advanced APIs, and many more features.
• It is similar to a reactive framework where the developers do not need to update the UI content manually.

Disadvantages or Cons of Flutter

The cons of Flutter technology are listed below:

• It primarily supports Dart programming for coding, so a developer needs to learn new technologies.
• The Flutter is a comparatively new language, so it does not have good community support.
• It provides very limited access to SDK libraries. It means a developer does not have a lot of functionalities to create a mobile application.

What is Ionic?

Ionic framework is an open-source UI toolkit for building high-quality mobile, desktop, and progressive web apps using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It has a feature to build once and run everywhere. It was created by Max Lynch, Ben Sperry, and Adam Bradley of Drifty Co. in 2013. The first beta version of the Ionic framework was released in March 2014.

It mainly focuses on front-end user experience or UI interaction, which handles all the look and feel of our app. It is easy to learn and can integrate with other libraries or frameworks such as Angular, Cordova, etc. It can also be used as a standalone without a front-end framework using a simple script include.

Advantages or Pros of Ionic

The pros of an Ionic framework are listed below:

• It is easy to learn because it needs basic knowledge of CSS, HTML, or JavaScript technologies to build applications.
• It provides well-structured documentation to the developers.
• It supports the cross-platform feature that can deploy the apps on multiple platforms with a single codebase.
• It is built on Angular that provides many functionalities to the developer for building an application.

Disadvantages or Cons of Ionic

The cons of an Ionic framework are listed below:

• It is still in the development phase, so its library can be rewritten at any time.
• It does not offer good security as compared to other native applications.
• Its performance is not good; however, the performance gap is not noticeable for average users.
• It is not suitable for high-end graphics-dependent applications.

Flutter vs. Ionic

The following comparison chart explains the main differences between Flutter and Ionic: