Flutter vs React Native: Which Is The Best Development Trend In 2020?

7 min readAug 26, 2020

Flutter vs React Native? Which one is better for cross-platform development technology that fits your business needs and budget?

Obviously, both Flutter and React Native have their own advantages and limitations. Therefore, you are still considering which framework is best fits your brilliant app idea.

In this article, we will split off the comparison between Flutter vs React Native. “What is Flutter?”, “Will Flutter be the development trend of 2020?”, “Which cross platform mobile app development is best to choose?”

But before we get started, let’s see all the statistics below!

Flutter Vs React Native: Market Share

Global Digital 2019 reports reveals that internet users are growing by an average of more than one million new users every day. On average, the world’s internet users spend 6 hours and 42 minutes online each day.

In addition, the current number of mobile phone users is 4.78 billion, which makes 61.51% of people in the world a cell phone owner in 2020.

That’s not all. According to GlobalWebIndex, people are using mobile apps to manage almost every aspect of their lives from ordering food online to managing their finances to even finding soulmates.

Now, you must be wondering why we are so much focusing on these statistics? Flutter vs react native? There are the reasons:

1. The fact is that mobile app developments have taken the world in just a few years especially after the year 2018.

2. At the same time, Google Trends shows that Flutter is catching up with React Native.

As you can see, the growth of Flutter and React Native have been at the expense of the once popular Cordova and Xamarin. Basically, it’s a two horse race between the modern contenders — Google’s Flutter and Facebook’s React Native.

Flutter has 81,200 Stars on Github, while React Native has 83,200. (December 2019)

On the other hand, Statista shows that 42 percent of software developers used React Native. While, Flutter is chosen by 39% developers.

Flutter vs react native? Certainly, making a choice between flutter and react native will not be as easy as you might think.

So that, let’s start with the basic overview of these two top frameworks with the detailed comparison!

1. Flutter vs React Native: In a nutshell

flutter vs react native performance comparison

2. Flutter Vs React Native: Popularity

Want to know what cross-platform apps built with React Native or Flutter look like?

Apps built with React Native

In fact, you’re already familiar with React Native apps. You may be using them daily without even knowing it.

Apps Built with Flutter

Now let’s take a quick look at popular app using Flutter.

When comparing Flutter vs React Native, React Native was launched in 2015 and Flutter in 2018. Therefore, it has a comparatively bigger community and users.

By contrast, Flutter has shown an astounding amount of growth in the short time. On the other side, Flutter is supported by Google. So it will catch up to React Native very soon.

3. Flutter vs React Native: Performance Comparison

When it comes to evaluating the performance of these frameworks, Flutter is surely faster at coding than React Native.

React Native has been successfully used in projects from small to massive like Facebook, Instagram, Skype, and Walmart to name just a few. It also has a significant fanbase of skilled developers.

However, with Flutter, the C++ engine helps to support the language flawlessly.

In addition, thanks to FPS animation standards with its accompanying Skia graphics library, Flutter can lead to smooth and fast apps.

4. Programming Language

React Native — JavaScript

React Native is similar framework among developers since it’s based on Javascript. Additionally, Javascript is considered as a default language for almost every browser.

That’s why when hiring software development company, people prefer to hire react native developers.

Flutter — Dart

Whereas, Flutter is based on Google’s in-house language — Dart. Therefore, it is considered as an object-oriented programming language. On the other hand, Dart is an expressive and safe language to start with.

As the result, JavaScript is easy to adopt. While Dart is not known widely in the development community.

5. Native Appearance

Flutter works without the use of additional APIs. Unlike React Native, this framework does all of the work to bridge the divide between the device and the codebase.

React Native is compiled to the native code, invoking objective-C and the Java API. Not only displaying native components in iOS and Android, it also provides direct access to native functionality.

6. UI and API

When comparing React Native vs Flutter, there are similar. For example, they both offer cross-platform support. But, in many other areas, they are opposites.

For example, Flutter is rich in components:

Come with UI rendering components, loads of libraries, testing, stateful management, navigation, and device API access.
These components will not allow you to use third-party libraries.
Material design and Cupertino allow developers to render the UI on both iOS and Android platforms easily.

For example, React Native is less components:

Need to obtain these 3rd party libraries separately.
Possibly dynamic framework with a powerful and flexible API for 2D and animation.

As we can see, Flutter has rich components while React Native is dependent on third-party libraries.

Is Flutter The Development Trend of 2020?

1. Fast Development

Flutter have a collection of visual, structural, platform, and interactive widgets. It will help you create beatiful apps faster. Flutter have a rich widget for Material Design and Cupertino Design (IOS-style widget). It is very usefull for developer to build app.

Useful links & resources

Productive Development

Make changes to your source code iteratively, using hot reload to instantly see the effect in the running app
Write code using a flexible type system with rich static analysis and powerful, configurable tooling.
Do profiling, logging, and debugging with your code editor of choice.

Dart is optimized for UI

Mature and complete async-await for user interfaces containing event-driven code, paired with isolate-based concurrency.
A programming language optimized for building user interfaces with features such as the spread operator for expanding collections, and collection if for customizing UI for each platform

2. Native Performance

Flutter aims to provide 60 frames per second (fps) performance, or 120 fps performance on devices capable of 120Hz updates.

Flutter is different than most other options for building mobile apps because Flutter uses neither WebView nor the OEM widgets that shipped with the device. Instead, Flutter uses its own high-performance rendering engine to draw widgets.
Flutter is use Dart for development. Dart runtimes and compilers support the combination of two critical features for Flutter: a JIT-based fast development cycle that allows for shape changing and stateful hot reloads in a language with types, plus an Ahead-of-Time compiler that emits efficient ARM code for fast startup and predictable performance of production deployments.

3. Flutter Community Is Growing Fast

The community of flutter is growing fast. It will is a useful for developer when have issue on development. Besides, Google is provider for Flutter a good document to developer can research and easy to learning on flutter.dev.

4. Perfect for an MVP

In startups, there is a definite need to learn about the impact of new product development. A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the best approach to verify a business idea.

By doing so, you can avoid the failures by predicting it upfront and also get the required feedback.

As to its high speed, ease of integration, and flexible UI, Flutter has become a perfect choice to create a mobile MVP.

Flutter vs React Native: Which One Is Better?

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