The demand for mobile apps day by day increasing to a considerable extent. Due to this, the developers have searched a fast framework to build the app. Many developers have started using a cross-platform feature to make a fast app that gives many features to design e-commerce apps, interactive apps, and social apps.

In this section, we are going to compare the differences between Flutter and Xamarin, which helps us to identify which framework is best for our app idea. Before making a comparison, we will discuss in brief about these technologies.

What is Xamarin?

Xamarin is an open-source, cross-platform mobile development app for iOS, Android, and Windows with .Net. It is an abstraction layer that manages the communication between shared code and platform code. It allows the developer to write the code once and can be reused it everywhere and achieve native performance, look and feel, etc. on each platform.

Xamarin is a software company that originated in 2011 and now acquired by Microsoft in 2016. It is a framework that develops the mobile application using the C# language. It also uses HTML and JavaScript to develop apps like a website for mobile apps using JS libraries. Xamarin tools are easily available to download with Visual Studio. We can use Xamarin tools to develop an app on Windows by downloading and installing Visual Studio, which could be a free version or a premium license.

Advantages or Pros of Xamarin

The pros of Xamarin technology are listed below:

Performance: Xamarin apps are famous for having native-like performances.

Complete development ecosystem: Xamarin apps are build using C#, .Net, and Microsoft Visual Studio, which makes it a complete cross-platform mobile app development framework.

Shared App Logic: It is a powerful feature of Xamarin, making it the most useful cross-platform development tool. Application Logic such as the input validation, web service calls, database interactions, and backend enterprise integrations are coded once in C# and can share 75% of the code across various operating systems. It saves the time and effort of the developers.

Xamarin Component Store: Xamarin believes in Collaboration and Component sharing. It allows the developer to choose the host free or paid component that includes UI controls, cross-platform libraries, and third-party web services to build the app logic with a few lines of code.

Seamless user experience: Xamarin provides the advantage of Native UI, access to specific device features, and, most importantly, native performance. These features make the user experience amazing.

Disadvantages or Cons of Xamarin

The following are the disadvantages of Xamarin Technology:

Updates delay: If the new features or updates roll out in this technology, these changes are usually delayed until they are reflected in the Xamarin tools. This may cause issues with our app.

Heavy graphics: Xamarin is not suitable for building complex applications or mobile games with heavy graphics.

Platform-specific code: Sometimes, we might need to re-write some parts of the UI in our app in native code, such as Kotlin or Java for Android, and Swift or Objective-C for iOS.

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.

Flutter vs. Xamarin

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