Summary

Flutter and React Native are the two most popular frameworks for creating cross platform mobile applications. Both are excellent choices when you need to develop one application that needs to run on both iOS and Android devices.

You can create a high quality, high performance app for most use cases using either. The most important issues to consider when making the decision of which technology to use are: the skill set of your current team your ability to hire engineers for the project the developer experience of each platform

Biggest differences

Technically, the biggest difference between the two is how each renders the user interface.

Flutter ‘draws’ the components of the app onto the screen directly. You will primarily have the same look and feel across platforms (with some differences to make the components conform to expectations of each operating system). When the next version of an operating system is released, the look and feel won’t change..

React Native transforms the components written by a developer into native UI components. This results in more familiar looking components to the users of that operating system. When the user updates their operating system the UI of the app will automatically reflect the changes.

The second important difference between them is that Flutter uses the Dart programming language while React Native uses JavaScript or TypeScript. TypeScript and Dart are close enough in performance and usability that there’s not a clear winner between them. Where it matters is the depth of the talent pool. JavaScript/TypeScript have a large advantage. Dart is not a particularly hard language to learn, but it is certainly a factor.

A Stack Overflow survey of the most popular technologies (source)

Performance

For most use cases, the performance between the Flutter and React Native should be negligible. Both platforms have recently made significant improvements in this respect, React Native with its JavaScript Interface and Flutter’s recent switch to the Impeller Rendering Engine for iOS.

If eking out every bit of performance is important to your application, then you’ll want to avoid using cross-platform frameworks and develop your apps natively in Swift and Kotlin.

Developer Experience

Availability of 3rd party packages for React Native is larger because it draws on the NPM ecosystem, but Flutter’s is catching up and has 3rd party packages for most important use cases.

Debugging is easier and more tightly integrated in Flutter than it is in React Native.

Flutter was ranked much higher in Stack Overflow’s 2022 Loved vs Dreaded survey

Web and desktop applications

Flutter has the ability to build web and desktop applications from the same codebase as your mobile application. Both are relatively new, but considered stable by Google. There are limitations on what you can do for web and desktop applications in Flutter, and not all 3rd party packages support them.

React Native does not currently have production ready web or desktop applications, but they do have some experimental offshoots.

Conclusion

The mobile teams at Beta Acid have extensive experience working with both Flutter and React Native. We are confident that either choice will be great for our clients technical needs. We make it a point to carefully talk through the softer issues around our client’s current skill sets, developer experience, and ability to hire before making any recommendations.