Frameworks are proven to be advantageous to developers. They improve efficiency, reduce time-to-market, and introduce diversity in development.
The app development ecosystem is overwhelmed with a plethora of frameworks that are brought in by techies or big techs in the market. Frameworks written in Javascript, Python, C#, PHP are the most popular in the app development domain.
If we talk about mobile app development in particular, then React Native surely rules the list of top 10 frameworks that we have today. Its popularity can be accounted to the trust in Facebook (its developer), cross-platform development (with native look & feel), code reusability in multiple apps, and other technical features like virtual DOM, declarative programming, etc. To add to this, the Javascript-powered framework just got better with every public release.
There are hundreds of positive reasons to choose React Native for app development. But, for any reason, what if its alternative is needed? Well, in that case, we do have some interesting competitors of this app development framework which you can surely rely upon qualitative development.
In the upcoming segment of this blog post, we will discuss some of the best alternatives to React Native framework. We will also compare the alternatives with React Native to give some valid reasons to choose the technology. Let's get started.
1. React Native Alternative: Flutter
Flutter, just like React Native is a cross-platform framework for building native-like apps. It can be used for building beautiful interfaces for iOS and Android with a single codebase, just like React Native. Some of the reasons to chose Flutter over React Native includes:
- Flutter uses Dart programming language for writing the code and has built-in widgets to build an app. Great look & feel with widgets is the number one reason.
- The popularity and community of Flutter are rapidly growing. Anytime, any problem, you can reach out to the great community members for help.
- The team Flutter offers excellent documentation to get started with the Flutter framework for app development.
- No bridging is required between native components and Dart programming language. For that reason, Flutter’s performance is faster than React Native which requires JS bridging when the app interacts with the native component.
2. React Native Alternative: Nativescript
Nativescript, just like React Native is an open-source framework for building native apps. Javascript, Angular, VueJS, and Typescript are the base languages for mobile app development with this Nativescript.
With this React Native alternative, web development skills (Angular, VueJS, CSS, etc.) can be utilized to build native apps for Android and iOS platforms. Some of the reasons to choose Nativescript over React Native includes:
- With Nativescript, developers can use the existing plugins from npm, CocaPods (iOS), and Gradle (Android) directly. Along with this, there are hundreds of verified Nativescript plugins.
- When we talk about development speed, React Native is surely a winner. However, Nativescript is a decent alternate to React Native here with the delivery of fair performance using web programming languages.
- Nativescript is a free and open-source framework for app development. It has got its own community forum where developers can ask and answer questions.
3. React Native Alternative: Xamarin
Xamarin is a framework for cross-platform app development for building Android and iOS apps using .NET and C#. Xamarin is owned by Microsoft and was considered to be the first product launched to resolve the problem of the disconnected technology stack for native app development.
A couple of reasons that makes Xamarin a worthy alternative to React Native includes:
- The benefit of Xamarin is, you can write code for an iPhone app on Windows and then compile it on Mac. There is platform dependency only for the build.
- The look & feel of the app is absolutely native. It has an active community of over 60,000 contributors from more than 3,700 companies.
- Front end development with Xamain powered by Microsoft’s cloud service- Azure makes the duo a combination for complete app development.
- The performance of apps created using Xamarin is equivalent to those of React Native which makes Xamarin one of the finest alternatives to Facebook’s React Native.
Which is the Best Alternative to React Native?
When it comes to choosing a solution that can replace React Native, the options out there are numerous. However, making a choice between some of the close matches makes decision-making simpler.
The three alternatives to React Native shared above are the ones that our development team swears by. The decision at the end depends upon the project, scale, feature requirement, and integrations.
If you have an app development idea in mind, then connect with our experts to know which framework would work best for your project.
