REACT NATIVE VS IONIC - WATCH THIS

Here is our review of React Native vs Ionic with their pros, cons, and respective strengths.

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React Native is the most popular JS framework for native mobile development, but there are many promising competitors on the market. One of them is Ionic. What would be the best choice if we compare React Native and Ionic? Let’s figure this out!

Ionic is a JavaScript-based toolkit for mobile UI development. The main point of Ionic is its integrations: the framework supports the functionality of React and Angular.

React Native is a JS framework for native app development. The tool uses Javascript APIs along with native components. With Native, developers can write and maintain the same codebase for Android and iOS, using JS instead of native languages. React Native doesn’t use web views, basically removing the additional code layer, which leads to better performance.

[Jelvix]

React Native vs Ionic: which one is your winner? Point out their pros, cons, and strengths just here in the comments! 🤔

[PaulSebastianManole]

I feel like you've missed Ionic's main advantage and that is that you can target not only all mobile platforms with one single common code-base but also desktop as well because Ionic is more portable due to the simple fact that under the hood it is using just standard web technologies and doesn't abstract them as much as React Native does.

Ionic's team has built Stencil.js for this purpose specifically: To build the same component once with pure JavaScript and have it compile and render with native look&feel (desktop/web, iOS, Android, etc.) on any platform. In fact components built with Stencil are closer to native Web Components than native Angular, React or Vue components but thanks to the power of Stencil and integration with Capacitor/Cordova, they can be compiled to the native component of any frontend framework (Angular/Vue/Rect/Svelte/etc) and behave like native platform components (iOS/Android widgets).

This degree of portability is very important in reducing costs. That's probably why Ionic is used more in the enterprise world not just because the enterprise world doesn't have so many users (and with proper code splitting, I don't think you couldn't serve an Ionic app to millions of users).

[arthurvieira]

3:08 SaaS isn't the same thing as Sass, please don't confuse

[walidzhani]

I am using: Ionic 5⃣ + React #16 = beautiful result

[leomosia]

So confusing, you can’t say react while talking about react native. Be specific you hurting my brain 🙃

[JBuchmann]

I've been using Ionic for a few years, (with Angular) but just recently learned React Native, so here sre my thoughts...

React Native:
I already know React, so the learning curve wasn't too hard. I just basically needed to learn how to replace HTML with the alternative tags, and replace CSS with it's equivalent. Plus learn the quirks that it brings. I was surprised to see that out of the box, React Native doesn't include much stuff for the UI. The Button component is super basic and you can only customize the color. So you need to create your own button component in most cases. It's missing so much, but it's recommended that you also use Expo, and Expo thankfully picks up some slack and offers some UI elements. So to get a more complete set of UI components you need to use both React Native and Expo, which is a pain.

But the relative lack of components in React Native made it fairly fast to learn. Most layout stuff is done by nesting <View> tags and styling them. And their layout is mostly done with it's implementation of CSS Flexbox. So if you know that already then there's not a lot to learn.

If you use Expo, then building and deploying is highly simplified. Expo can also submit your app to the app stores for you, and I think you can in theory even build and submit apps even if you don't develop on a Mac.

Ionic:
I like how Ionic has all the common UI elements out of the box, and they're all so beautiful and polished. Also not too difficult to customize the look/feel if you need to. I like how all UI components will work on all platforms (desktop, iOS, Android). While some React Native components will only work on one or the other platform. For example the "Action Sheet" component in React Native will only work on iOS. It's good in Ionic because it's all just HTML, CSS and JS. If you're building a "website" in Ionic, it's as easy to debug as any website, by using DevTools. But once you cross the line and make it also an Android/iOS app, then debugging is more of a pain. But it's about as equally of a pain as debugging in React Native.

I think Ionic is a better choice if you ALSO want your app to be a website. So one code base for website, iOS and Android. But it can be tricky to "design" the thing so that it looks like a traditional app on a phone, yet a traditional website on a desktop screen. If you don't plan on your app being a website, then Ionic is still a great choice, but also React Native is a great choice also. They say Ionic is slower because the app is running in a web view. That is true, but it also depends on the application. If your app is super demanding and needs to be 100% snappy fast, then React Native would be a better choice. But if the app isn't so demanding, you may not even notice a speed difference between the two.

With Ionic you don't have anything equivalent to Expo, so you're on your own as far as building and submitting apps to the app stores.

So which one to choose? I don't know as I'm also trying to figure it out. But above is what I've personally learned. Good luck!

[mukonank]

Thanks for the info. I just finished learning css, html & js. Though I think ionic is easier however which one you recommend?

[magne]

2:40 React Native for Web makes React Native compatible with react-dom.

[paulasanchez]

I am building an eCommerce app. would it have a better performance using React Native?

[richmanamadi]

Based on your explanations, I thinks React Native is best suitable for build Native Mobile Apps

[harilal.s]

Which is better to create a grocery application?