React native by Facebook and Flutter by
Google are too hot cross-platform app development technologies creating a buzz
in today's technical industry. Today in this video we will be comparing flutter
with react native and I'll be helping you choose when you should choose one
over the other. Okay, so let's get started. Now before I get started let me just
give you guys a brief overview of the topics that will be touched upon by me
today so first of all I will be going through what is flutter and t
hen I will
be giving a similar brief introduction to react native to so that we have a
general idea of what we are talking about if you guys have no idea as to
what flutter and react native is and would like to know more you could go
ahead and check out my flutter tutorial which you can easily find out on Edureka channel. ok we don't have such tutorial for react native at the moment
but we are working on that and that will be out soon too so for now
I'll be giving you guys a short introduction t
o both technologies and
then moving on we will be comparing the two technologies on various parameters
now these parameters include stuff like performance speed which already comes
into performance and the visualizations the types of confidence that you get the
developer creativity that it might imbue and a lot more so there are 10 points
that we will be comparing flutter and react native today and in the real-world
scenario you can find more than these 10 points but in my opinion these 10 point
s
are the pillars when it comes to choosing a certain framework so these
include stuff like the quality of documentation now if some framework is
not properly documented it becomes really hard to adapt to that framework
ok so let's move on and start off with this session today before I keep
blabbering on and on ok so our first topic of the day is what
is flutter Flutter is a cross-platform mobile
application development framework that is provided to us by google so before we
go ahead let me just
explain what that means
so due to the growing popularity of mobile applications almost every company
needs mobile apps or apps to remain competitive in the market and what is
more companies are looking for an option to build mobile applications especially
for ios and android with faster speed and less resources obviously Apple and
Google have provided native tools and technologies to build applications iOS
app developers can build apps using Xcode and Swift while an Android
developers use Andro
id studio Kotlin Java and more of such things however
this requires engineer to learn two completely different sets of
technologies as a result companies have started to adopt cross-platform
solutions over the needs of solution to build apps for both iOS and Android
which basically implements faster using a single language so flutter is a
project started by Google and it was started in 2017 it is a programming
framework built on the language of dart and it allows you to make cross-platform
apps
that behave natively for a mobile application if you want to know more
about flutter please go check out my flutter tutorial where you will also
learn how to make your first app using flutter itself moving on to react native
well react native is something very similar to flutter it is a mobile
application development framework that is developed by Facebook the people who
built react Jas and redux so this is their mobile application front so react
native is what Facebook uses for its Facebook app
lications is messengers and
everything else now this works on both iOS and Android and main language that
this whole framework is built around is JavaScript now before we go ahead and
start digging out each and every nitty-gritty of these both frameworks
first of all let's go ahead and compare them so today we will be comparing on
stuff like programming language technical architecture installation
setup and project configuration UI confidence and development API developer
productivity community
support testing support build and release automation
support and the DevOps CI CD support hearing all this you must have realized
that this is a very developer specific video this is a developer's perspective
on both these frameworks and this is not a layman's perspective where he tries to
understand which installation is tougher or which framework is bigger like that
this is a completely developers perspective as to what would help you if
you are a developer whether you're using flutter or EF n
ative now the first part
that we are going to be comparing is programming language so the key benefit
of using a cross-platform mobile application development technology is
the ability to use a single programming language to develop apps for both iOS
and Android so flutter uses the dart programming language which was
introduced by Google in 2011 and is rarely used by developers Dart syntax is
easy to understand for JavaScript on Java developers as it supports most of
the object-oriented concepts
it's easy to get started with dart as there is a
great and easy to follow documentation available on the official dart site
react native on the other hand uses Java Script to build cross-platform
applications javascript is very popular language in the web community at the
moment it is commonly used with react and other popular JavaScript frameworks
thanks to react native web developers can build mobile applications with a
little bit of training with this in mind companies adopted react native a
s a
no-brainer javascript is a dynamically typed
language and anything can be done with JavaScript which is good and a bad thing
at the same time so what do we analyze from this comparison javascript is
widely used by most web developers and hence it is easy to adopt the react
native framework dart also has a great feature set but it's rarely used and
less known in the developer community considering this it's clear that react
neither wins point in the programming language category our next poin
t of
comparison is installation so the installation method
be straightforward without having too many complicated steps so that it could
be easily learned by developers that are just starting out with it
flutter can be installed by downloading the binary for a specific platform from
the github page which is very easy in my opinon case of Mac OS you can
download the flutter dot zip file that is also there in the github page and you
also have to set up a separate path variable now you can do this
easily by
the command line instructions that you can find on the official documentation
so flutter should improve the installation method by supporting
package managers like homebrew Mac board C um apt etcetera so that users won't
need to perform these extra steps during installation react native framework can
be installed using the node package manager or NPM for short for developers
that have a Java Script background installation of react native is easy
whereas other developers would need to l
earn the new package manager the node
package manager can install the packages locally or globally the developer will
need to understand where exactly the binary is located whilst installing
react native on Mac OS you will need to have the homebrew package manager as
well in short you can do it from the command line okay so what do we analyze
from this comparison well both flutter and react need a black one-liner
installation with native package managers for specific OS but flutter
installation
seems to require extra steps for adding the binary to the path
and downloading it from the source code which might be useful for non JavaScript
developers react native can be installed by just using package manager without
hassle of downloading the binary from the source so in my opinion react native
winds out here again when compared to the installation point now the next
parameter that we are going to be actually comparing react and flutter on
is documentation so the process of setting up the
developer machine to use
the new framework takes time it requires a lot of configuration of software
installation and the technology should have proper documentation to get users
up and running getting started guide for flutter
has detailed information on IDE setup and platform setup for both iOS and
Android you can read up all the required steps
on the installation link on top of this flutter also has a command line
interface tool called flutter doctor which can guide developers through the
set
up it inspects which tools are installed on the local machine and which
tools need to be configured once the flutter doctor command is happy
we can carry on with creating a new flutter app there is a separate page on
how to configure the editor to get going with flutter and you can also find this
in the documentation once all is set up and done we can create and run a new
flutter app from the command line by just running a few simple instructions
on the other hand the getting started guide of re
act native assumes that the
developer already has all the required setup for developing for iOS and Android
there is little information on the Xcode command-line tools but it won't be
enough to get going the documentation directly jumps to the step of creating a
new project a new reactive project can also be created and run on an iOS
simulator using some few simple commands now at the step you must be thinking
what might be the result well from the comparison above it's clear that flutter
offers
a better documentation and command-line support for setup and
configuration so flutter takes the point out here now the next point for
configuration is architecture now when choosing a cross-platform mobile app
development framework it's essential to consider its technical architecture by
knowing the internals of the framework we can make an informed decision and
choose the one that is better for our project
flutter uses the dart framework which has most of the components inbuilt so
it's bigger
in size and often does not require to bridge to communicate with
the needs of modules dart has so many frameworks like material design and
Cupertino packed inside which provide all the required technologies needed to
develop mobile applications dart framework uses key R C++ engine which
has all the protocols compositions and channels the architecture of flutter
engine is explained in detail on github in short flutter has everything needed
for app development in the flutter engine itself on the
other hand react
native architecture heavily relies on the JavaScript runtime environment
architecture also known as the JavaScript
now the JavaScript code is compiled into native code at runtime react native uses
the flux architecture from Facebook and there is a detailed article on the core
architecture of react native here now in short react native uses JavaScript
bridges to communicate with react native modules
well the flutter engine has the most of the native confidence in the framework
it
self and it always doesn't need a bridge to communicate with the need of
confidence react native however uses the JavaScript bridge to communicate with
native modules which results in poorer performance so from a developer's
perspective out here flutter wins again our next point of comparison is features
and API so when developing cross-platform mobile application
support for the native component is key without the support of native components
our application moon feed like a native app and it's
very important that the
framework has an API to access the needs of modules without any pin so flutter
framework is bundled with UI rendering components device API access navigation
testing stateful management and loads of libraries the rich set of components
remove the need to use third-party libraries if you get the flutter
framework it means you will be having everything needed for developing a
mobile application flutter also has widgets for material design and
Cupertino that allows develope
rs to easily render
the UI on both iOS and Android platforms on the other hand the core react native
framework provides just the UI rendering and device access API is in order to
access most of the native modules the ask native has to rely on third-party
libraries react native is too much dependent on third-party libraries and
the full list of development components and official ApS can be found on the
documentation so from the analysis we reach to the conclusion that flutter is
rich in developm
ent API and UI components while react native is too
much dependent on third-party libraries so as a developer I would give my point
to flutter onion now the next point that we are going to be discussing is
developer productivity so developer productivity is key to
building faster apps and in this regard it's very important to be able to focus
on application development without any kind of weight or distraction so on the
side of flutter there is a hot reload feature and it's very easy to get
star
ted with the demo application however as the complexity of the
application grows developers would need to learn a lot and adopt the new flutter
concepts in addition dart is not a common language and there is a lack of
support for it in many IDE s and text editors on the other hand for react
native if the developer is skilled at JavaScript therein it's fairly easy to
use those skills for a cross-platform application development react native has
a hot reload feature which saves a lot of developer
time while testing the
changes in the UI in terms of IDE support developers are free to use any
text editor or IDE of their choice from the comparison we analyze and see that
being a mature framework react native has a great developer support in terms
of IDE and language features flutter is fairly new at this point but we'll catch
up very soon and the community around flutter is constantly growing now
talking about community our next point of comparison is community support so as
soon as develop
ers start to show interest in the technology and adopt it
in their development process they form a community to share knowledge a strong
community helps developers to learn from each other and solve the problems they
are facing so flutter has been around for a while but it gained a lot of
attention when Google promoted it in Google i/o conference in 2017 the
flutter community is growing rapidly these days meetups and confidence are
taking place online and the biggest event coming will be the flu
tter live in
December in short the flutter community is growing rapidly and yet there are
still not enough resources for developers to solve common issues while
on the react native side it was launched in 2015 and hence has gained a lot of
popularity ever since there is a community of react native developers on
github and it's a lots of meetups and conferences around the world one of the
most recent conferences on react native was react native EU held in Poland but
there are meetups taking place
in all most every major city in the world so
the react native community and resources have grown in size since the framework
was launched flutter is still fairly new all the community support is rapidly
growing so my point again in this round goes to react native now our point of
comparison is going to be something more technical and that is testing so writing
tests is a great way to get quick feedback on the code that you have
written there is always a testing framework associated with every m
ature
technology to allow developers to create unit integration and UI tests for the
applications flutter provides a rich set of testing features to test applications
at unit budgets and integration levels flutter has great documentation on
testing flutter apps and you can read about that in the official documentation
also flutter has a cool widget testing feature where we can create widget tests
to test the UI and run them at the speed of unit tests on the other hand react
native is a JavaScrip
t framework and there are a few unit level testing
frameworks available in JavaScript the tools like jest can be used for snapshot
testing however when it comes to integration or UI level testing there is
no official support from react native there are third-party tools like appium
and detox that can be used for testing and you can learn about them in my
appium tutorial video so from this we analyzed that the react Native community
has no official support for integration and UI level testing whi
le flutter has
great documentation and a rich set of features for testing and other such
applications so my point as a developer goes to flutter in this round now our
second last point of comparison is automation support so releasing mobile
applications to the App Store or Play Store as a painful process it involves
the complex task of code signing and all other application setup when it comes to
cross-platform mobile app development it gets even trickier so it's always
nice to have some automat
ion support there now let's talk about react first
this time so the react native documentation doesn't have any automated
steps to deploy iOS apps to App Store however it provides a manual process for
deploying the application from Xcode there is an article on how to
deploy react and you can find that in the official documentation
however you can do that using third-party tools like fastly in to
deploy iOS and Android applications written in react native the process of
using fastly into ship rea
ct native apps is kind of tricky but it is a thing that
you can do for yourself this means that react native has to rely
on third-party libraries for build and release automation flutter on the other
hand has a strong command-line interface we can create a binary of the app by
using the command-line tools and following the instructions in the
flutter documentation for building and releasing Android apps and iOS apps on
top of this flutter has officially documented the deployment of process
with
flash lean in their official documentation too so let's analyze now
flutter has a great build automation tooling and can be used to deploy apps
from the command line we have native apps like support for a command line
interface tools that are officially supported for build automation so
flutter has got five points at this moment which means a react native has
just scored the last point in order to tie the competition the last point of
comparison is the CI CD support or as you might know it the c
ontinuous
integration and continuous development support so DevOps has become quite the
big thing today so continuous integration in containers delivery
practices are essential for any application in order to get continuous
feedback and avoid releasing buggy code so react native doesn't have any
official documentation on setting up CI CD however there are some articles which
describe the CI CD for react native applications you can find such articles
on the web pretty commonly on the other hand f
lutter has a section on continuous
integration and testing which includes a link to external sources however
flutters rich command-line interface allows us to set up CI CD very easily
and you can read about them on blog post found on the web so flutter apps are
easy and painless to set up on continuous integration and continuous
development services by using its strong CLI tools react native doesn't provide
any official instructions for CI CD practices so my point goes to flutter
again in this p
art so flutter wins six points and react native has four points
so in conclusion we can say react native and flutter both have their pros and
cons but flutter came out as a winner in this match some of the industry experts
have predicted that flutter is the future of the mobile application
development considering the comparison we just did it's clear that flutter has
entered the cross-platform mobile development race in a very strong manner
let's not predict the future but wait and watch I'll me
et you guys in the next
video until then goodbye. I hope you have enjoyed listening to this video please
be kind enough to like it and you can comment any of your doubts and queries
and we will reply them at the earliest do look out for more videos in our
playlist and subscribe to Edureka channel to learn more, Happy learning
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