Flutter vs React Native, the big picture comparison

Let's compared the two best cross-platform framework on the market, Flutter and React Native (RN) in September 2021.

As you can see on the comparison picture above, RN is more mature and therefore has a bigger market share in the top 500 apps (8% vs 1% for Flutter, according to NIX). Google framework provides a clean material design out of the box and that's really nice if you are a startup and want to release an MVP really quickly. However, this also means extra work to make your app look unique.

Performances

Flutter is know to have the best performances but Skia is also coming to React Native and will bring high performance to RN. For those who don't know, Skia is an open source 2D graphics library that serves as the graphics engine for Google Chrome and Chrome OS, Android, Flutter and many other products.

React Native team is also working on :

• Fabric UI-Layer Re-architecture
• TurboModules NativeModules Re-architecture

Corporate Stories on React Native

• Shopify - Future of Mobile
• Coinbase - Successful transition
• Wix - After 5 years
• Airbnb - Leaving React Native

Corporate Stories on Flutter

• Nubank - Scaling mobile development at Nubank

Conclusion

Both frameworks are a safe bet and will remain an excellent choice for the next incoming year. In my opinion, Flutter could be more recommended for early-stage tech startups or for apps requiring complex calculations and animations, while established business would prefer React Native.

Beside NIX, I also used data from this excellent article of Droid on roids and I can also recommend this recent one too.

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