React Native Vs Ionic: Detailed Comparison 2020

React Native vs Ionic is a comparative look at two of the most popular UI building frameworks for mobile apps in 2019.

Ionic Framework is an open source UI toolkit for building high quality mobile and desktop apps using web technologies (HTML, CSS and Javascript). It focuses on the front end user experience of an app (controls, interactions, gestures, animations). Instead of using native features of phone/ platform, Ionic helps build hybrid apps which are websites that are embedded on a mobile platform through a WebView and styled to look like native.

React Native is also an open source mobile application framework used to build apps for iOS, Android, Web and UWP. It is used to enable developers to use React with native platform capabilities. React Native is like React but it uses native components instead of web components.

Ionic offers complete SDK to build hybrid apps, aiming to use a single codebase to run on multiple platforms while the goal of React Native is to leverage “learn once, write anywhere” theory. React Native adopts the native behavior and standards of the platforms and hence, gives seamless native experience. This framework has thousands of mobile apps built using Ionic so far.

React Native vs Ionic Comparison

Feature	React Native	Ionic
Purpose	Learn once, write everywhere	Write once, run everywhere
Language stack	React and Javascript	Web technologies: HTML, CSS, Javascript, Angular, JS, TypeScript
Code testing	Need a real mobile device or emulator to test app	Using any browser, the code can be tested
Mobile app type	Cross-platform native like	Hybrid apps
Coded in	Javascript, Typescript, JSX, Java, Objective-C, Swift	Javascript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS
User Experience	Responsive	Suboptimal
UI Elements	Native Components	Web UI components
Compilation	Interpreter/IIT	JIT with WKWebView/JIT
Use Cases	Facebook Skype Bloomberg	Pacifica MarketWatch McLaren Automotive

Platform: React Native vs Ionic

Ionic allows you to use HTML/CSS/JS to build iOS and Android apps, PWA’s, desktop apps or apps that run on any platform that the web runs on.

React Native utilizes the JS framework React, but renders native UI elements at runtime allowing you to build iOS and Android apps. React Native is not only for iOS and Android platforms because there are community supported projects that bring it to other platforms. For example, React Native macOS is an experimental Native fork that is targeting macOS and Cocoa.

Testing in React Native and Ionic

Here is a list of testing tools for React Native:

Jest

One of the attractive features of Jest is the snapshot testing.

Detox

Detox is an end-to-end testing library which is used to test apps built using React Native. It tests mobile apps while it is running on a simulator or a real mobile device and interacts with it like a real user.

Cypress

Cypress offers real-time reloads. Whenever there are changes in the code, Cypress will automatically reload.

Enzyme

Enzyme is used to test React components by checking the output.

To test apps built with Ionic, creating automated tests is a great way to improve the quality of the code, protect against code breaking regression when implementing new features and speed up testing and debugging. In a Javascript environment, the Jasmine testing framework is used to write tests and Karma is used to run them.

React Native Vs Ionic Performance

React Native is like using React but with native UI components which are still using foundational languages such as Javascript, HTML and CSS. This ensures the user experience will be similar to a native app. From a performance point of view, React Native is a lot faster than an app written with Ionic. Why is that? Because React Native uses Javascript to talk to the platforms (iOS, Android) with the help of a mobile javascript API that talks to the native platform API.

Ionic is based on Cordova which relies on a WebView component which uses a HTML layout engine to render a HTML/ CSS user interface.

Best Practices on Improving Performance

The speed of an app is critical because customers will not stand for a slow app. Developers can optimize hybrid app speed by optimizing Javascript code to minimize load times.

Native Scrolling – Ionic offers developers to use native scrolling instead of its default Javascript scrolling. This option can be enabled per view or by an ion-content tag.
Replacing Collection-Repeat – Replace collection-repeat with ng-repeat can reduce stutter when used with native scrolling.
Defining Class Methods – Defining class methods for each instance of bazBar is inefficient.
Compression – Remove unnecessary characters, compress images and files as compactly as possible to reduce load times.
Asynchronous Transfer – Large apps can be loaded in stages when loading big data takes too long. Use software like Blaze FEO or Riverbed StingRay Aptimizer to optimie content based on Google’s performance rules.
Javascript Initialization – Initialization can greatly reduce app speed but developers can move all their JS files to the bottom of page by using ‘async’ or ‘defer’ attributes.
Instance Variable Declaration – Placing the instance variable declaration variable on the prototype with value type instead of reference prevents running the initialization code each time the constructor is accessed.
Content Delivery Networks – CDNs include services that reduce network latency and speed up apps with various techniques like network routing optimization. CDN networks include Amazon CloudFront, Limelight, Akamai, Edgecast and telecommunications companies like AT&T and Level3.

Pros and Cons of React Native vs Ionic

When choosing React Native vs Ionic, you may want to consider the technology stack as the dominant factor. React Native offers benefits that Ionic does not offer but Ionic has features that React Native lacks. Let us look at the pros and cons of each of these technologies.

React Native

Pros:

Ability to target multiple platforms with less native code
One framework, multiple platforms
Strong, Open-Source Community
Cost: Free of Charge for both personal and commercial
Available templates and starter kits to cut development times

Cons:

Code and UI limitations
Requires a savvy team to keep abreast of changes in technology and features

Ionic