React Native vs. Flutter: Everything you need to know

Flutter and React Native are both popular mobile app development frameworks that give you a head start on developing cross-platform applications. Flutter is a framework that uses the Dart programming language, while React Native uses JavaScript. Each has its own unique ecosystem, features, and advantages for different use cases. 

This guide investigates the practical differences between Flutter and React Native to help you choose which to learn and which is best for a specific project based on your requirements.

What is React Native?

React Native is a framework for building mobile applications using the React JavaScript library. Like React, it is open source, and allows you to build interactive user interfaces using JavaScript or TypeScript. While it shares syntax and functionality with React, it uses native user interface (UI) components from the target platform, rather than custom HTML and CSS UI components, or UI elements from a pre-built React component library.

Apple iOS/iPadOS and Android are natively supported by React Native, and it can be extended with additional libraries for Windows and MacOS, and for the web and Electron using React Native for Web. 

React Native is a popular alternative to using native development tools for iOS and Android mobile apps. Rather than maintaining two separate codebases (Kotlin or Java for Android, Objective-C or Swift for mobile Apple devices), you only need to write your code logic and build your UI using React Native, which will take its UI components (including buttons, form inputs, lists, and other interactive elements) from the host operating system transparently. This allows you to maintain a single codebase for your project for all platforms, reducing code maintenance overheads.

React Native doesn't just provide support for native UI elements: While React solely focuses on presentation, React Native also provides APIs for interacting with the host OS to assist with building cross-platform apps that can take full advantage of the devices they run on.

Features and advantages of React Native

React Native streamlines the development of cross-platform applications with a shared codebase, while also removing the need to build your own UI components. This also provides the following advantages for developers and end users:

• A native look and feel: End users benefit from an application that looks and behaves like other native applications, ensuring a familiar, intuitive user experience.

• A single codebase: You can easily bring your app to new audiences by adding additional platforms to your React Native projects. Development overheads are also reduced, as you only need to maintain a single core codebase.

• Community support: React has a huge community, including libraries, tutorials, and forums. This makes it easier to find help, and leverage the work of others to further reduce development time. React is open source, so you are also free to use it in whichever way you want, without cost.

• Performance: By using native UI components, React Native can be more performant than applications that need to render custom HTML and CSS. However, it does not compile to native code, so it does not perform as well as fully native applications (or Flutter).

• It's React: React is so popular because it makes development with JavaScript a more straightforward and efficient process through modularity and code reusability. Your existing React knowledge can be used to build mobile apps using React Native, making it easier to adopt and transfer skills between projects.

How to develop cross-platform apps using React Native

You can build React Native applications using your existing development tools, utilizing common Node.js and JavaScript toolchains. 

You can find a full guide for getting started with React Native in its documentation.

What is Flutter?

Flutter is an open-source mobile app development framework by Google for building natively compiled, multi-platform (mobile, web, and desktop) applications from a single codebase. It primarily uses the Google-owned Dart programming language. It supports native compilation for Android and iOS, as well as the development of Windows, Linux, and MacOS desktop applications without the need for additional tools.

User interfaces in Flutter are built from widgets. A widget is an immutable description of part of a user interface that describes how views and layouts should look given their current configuration and state. Widgets are to Flutter what components are to React.

Flutter is powered by the Flutter engine, which is built on top of C++ and integrates with Skia, a 2D graphics rendering library. The engine is powered by Dart, executed in a Dart virtual machine (VM), which supports just-in-time (JIT) and ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation for fast compilation times.

The Flutter engine is a portable runtime responsible for the low-level implementation of Flutter’s core API, including graphics, text layout, file and network I/O, accessibility, and plugin architecture.

Dart vs. JavaScript

If you plan on building applications with Flutter, you will have to learn Dart; it's a strongly typed, object-oriented language designed specifically for high-performance and scalable applications. Unlike JavaScript, Dart compiles directly to machine code, delivering better performance.

Dart has a relatively simple learning curve, especially if you’re familiar with other object-oriented languages like Java, JavaScript, or C#. It combines features of these languages, making it accessible for most developers.

You can learn how to use Dart with Flutter to build a simple application here.

How to develop cross-platform apps using Flutter

Flutter provides a full development stack for building mobile apps for iOS and Android, as well as web and desktop apps. It takes a “kitchen sink” approach including a widget library and full application framework.

Find out how to get started using the Flutter documentation.

Features and advantages of Flutter

Flutter provides the following advantages to developers over developing native applications individually:

• Cross-platform compatibility: Like React Native, Flutter allows you to use a single codebase for multiple platforms, such as Android, iOS, and desktop, to save time, resources, and effort.

• Widgets: Flutter’s comprehensive selection of widgets covers a wide range of use cases. This allows developers to create highly customized and polished user interfaces without having to write complex code.

• Rich development tools: Flutter offers a rich development environment including integration with popular IDEs, a powerful command-line interface, well-structured documentation, and a wide range of tools and plugins for testing and debugging.

• Near native performance: Flutter apps are compiled to native machine code for Android and iOS using ahead-of-time compilation. Unlike other frameworks — such as Kotlin, which uses platform-native UI components — Flutter uses Skia to draw every pixel on the screen. This approach provides consistent visuals and performance across platforms, as well as advanced support for complex animations.

• Strong community support: Flutter has a large and growing community of developers who share tips and advice and support each other on forums and social media. This makes it easy for developers to get help and feedback as they work on their projects.

React Native vs. Flutter: Head-to-head comparison

Both React Native and Flutter are mature products that are well supported with documentation and community tools, but there are practical differences you can consider to help make the choice between them.

What is the most stable choice (longevity)?

The longevity and ongoing support for any development tool is critical to the long-term viability of a project. Factors that affect this are corporate backing and the size of the community — the more businesses and developers that rely on a library or framework, the more likely it is to be actively supported and developed into the future.

Both React Native and Flutter have good prospects in this respect: React Native is supported by Meta, and Flutter is backed by Google, and both actively use each in their products. Both also have large communities, with Flutter having over 170,000 stars on GitHub, surpassing even React Native with over 122,000 stars.

While React Native continues to have a larger community, Flutter has become a favorite with developers, as shown in Stack Overflow’s 2024 developer survey and popularity data from Statista:

Choosing between React Native and Flutter

Whether you should use React Native and Flutter depends on your requirements. If you are learning, you may want to choose tools that have wider adoption and more transferable skills. However, if you are building for a specific use case and have established programming skills, the choice will depend on the unique requirements of each project.

When is it best to use React Native?

Due to its shared React community, React Native has a large ecosystem with libraries for many common (and not so common) tasks. It has access to native API features (such as geolocation and push notifications) through community packages, and can be integrated with existing native apps without a full rewrite (known as incremental adoption).

React Native is popular with both small and large developers, and is used in products from Facebook, Tesla, and Microsoft.

When is it best to use Flutter?

Flutter is ideal for cross-platform apps that span web, mobile (iOS, Android), and desktop (Windows, MacOS, Linux) platforms due to its Skia rendering engine that ensures uniformity across environments.

Flutter also provides better performance and a full development environment. While it may not currently have the large community of React, it is thoroughly documented and includes more out-of-the-box developer functionality for building apps with less reliance on additional libraries.

Alibaba, Google, and eBay are some of the major players who build their apps using Flutter.

React Native vs. Flutter: Roadmaps and future plans

Choosing the tools you'll use to build your mobile apps isn't just about your present requirements: You should also consider what you'll need to scale up if your product takes off, including support for additional platforms or new technologies.

The developers of React Native and Flutter both publish information detailing what features they are working on. You can check out the React blog and the Flutter roadmap to find out what's new, and what's being worked on (and, more importantly, what's been fixed!).

Will Flutter replace React Native?

Flutter is not designed to, and will not, replace React Native. While Flutter is a “newer” tool, both are actively developed and continually improved to serve the different requirements of their developer communities.

While many of their use cases overlap, they will continue to coexist as alternative development tools suited to different development scenarios and end-user requirements.

Finding the right back end for React Native and Flutter

Contentful is the perfect backend solution for your apps, providing a composable content platform that can easily integrate with both Flutter and React Native. 

With Contentful, you can manage and deliver dynamic content to your mobile apps, websites, newsletters, billboards, and other channels by leveraging our SDKs for either Flutter or React Native. You can build rich user experiences by integrating content including text, images, and videos directly into your applications, all delivered from our fast and high-powered CDN and accessed using REST and GraphQL APIs. 

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