Flutter vs Ionic : Step-by-step Detailed Comparison As of 2025

Quick Overview: Flutter and Ionic are the most prominent technologies for hybrid app development, each offering unique features and functionalities. However, choosing the right framework is essential and challenging for business owners to make a project successful. Therefore, this research-driven article aims to provide a comprehensive comparison of these two frameworks: Flutter and Ionic. Let’s read it and make the right decision.

If you dream to chase the competitors and lead the front way of your industry in today’s tech realm, the first thing you must consider is a targeted audience. Therefore, in order to have a large user base, you must consider an option of a cross-platform application that works seamlessly on both Android and iOS platforms.

It’s tough to choose a new hybrid or cross-platform framework with the desired functionalities while not over budget. Every upcoming technology has its pros and cons and unique functionalities to offer, and it’s a tricky business. What you need is a comprehensive analysis of these frameworks concerning performance, UI, robustness, and many more.

While choosing the best cross-platform development frameworks, Flutter and Ionic are top in the list of frameworks. Nowadays, many businesses prefer hybrid frameworks for mobile app development because they follow the coding principle once and deploy it everywhere. It reduces cost dramatically while cutting development time too.

Of course, both Ionic framework and Flutter framework are popular cross-platform frameworks backed by a massive development team that believes in these two platforms’ uniqueness. Whereas Flutter has a brilliant set of integrated tools, customizations, and inbuilt widgets, Ionic offers myriads of plugins to boost the process of development.

Watch this short video to decode the key differences of Flutter and Ionic Framework.

While both frameworks are viable options, there are some unique pros and cons. This blog describes Flutter vs Ionic from the basics to ensure you are equipped with unbiased information to make the right choice.

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Flutter vs Ionic: Introduction

Developed by Google in 2017, the first version of Flutter was released in 2018 with the support of the ECMA standard. Flutter platform is a free and open-source framework. The primary goal of Flutter is to function as a UI toolkit to create feature-rich and powerful cross-platform applications. It supports Dart programming language, utilizes Swift and Objective C for iOS integration and Java for Android.

Being new in the market, Flutter doesn’t have a large support community as compared to other cross-platform apps. However, it is growing rapidly as many developers have started implementing it due to its capabilities and features. The amazing features of flutter enhance the mobile app development experiences.

On the other side, if we talk about Ionic, the first version was released in 2013 by Drifty Co. It offers an open-source UI toolkit and easy integration option with other open frameworks and libraries. Moreover, it uses standard web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. If you are a developer and planning to develop successful app, Ionic is considered an easy-to-learn framework.

What is Flutter?

Flutter is an extraordinary open-source framework. It functions with Google’s Dart language. It features an enriched UI toolkit used for building various cross-platform applications using a single codebase. Moreover, it allows developers to build flexible and expressive UI having native performance. Given below are some of the facts about this platform.

• 39% of developers use Flutter for building cross-platform mobile applications globally.
• 68.8% of the cross-platform development community prefer Flutter. Out of this community, 7.2% prefer Flutter because of the popularity of flutter tools and libraries.

Moreover, many developers choose Flutter for their seamless development and user experience. So, if you are a developer and want to join their community, you can install flutter on your devices now from the Installation guide and give your users a seamless experience. Also, you can read our flutter development guide, which will smoothen your development journey.

39% of developers use Flutter for building cross-platform mobile applications globally.

68.8% of the cross-platform development community prefer Flutter. Out of this community, 7.2% prefer Flutter because of the popularity of its tools and libraries.

Uses of Flutter

Flutter is primarily used for the following purposes:

1. MVP mobile apps

2. Material design apps

3. Apps having OS-level features

4. Advanced OS plugins having simple logic

5. High-performance apps featuring Skia rendering engine

6. Flexible UI and brilliant widgets

7. Reactive apps having massive data integration

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Flutter Pros and Cons

If you are a mobile app developer, you would know how Flutter brings its advantages and dark side. Here, I am going to cover every aspect of Flutter – pros and cons to give you a better understanding on when it will be useful.

Pros

1. Hot reloading that reflects changes instantly without losing the state of the application.

2. Powerful and rich widgets following Android Material Design and iOS Cupertino guidelines.

3. Seamless integration with Java supporting Android and Objective C or Swift supporting iOS.

4. Has swift iteration cycles that save development time because testing is needed for one codebase only.

5. It is easier and faster to write and share codes across several platforms, thus making it the best choice for MVP development.

Cons

1. Though Flutter features rich tools and libraries, it’s not as rich as Ionic.

2. Animation support and vector graphics could be better.

3. Incompatible with other developing apps for Android Auto, watchOS, CarPlay, or tvOS.

4. Cannot push patches or update instantly into apps without going through the traditional release process.

What is Ionic?

Ionic is also an open-source UI toolkit. However, it enables users to develop cross-platform mobile applications. For mobile, Ionic uses Webview instead of other native elements of the device.

The Ionic framework has the key advantages of JavaScript codebases such as Angular, Vanilla JavaScript, Vue, or React. The framework provides efficient performance with the least DOM manipulation. With best Ionic development services, you can leverage vast libraries of mobile-optimized UI components, tools and gestures to build future-ready mobile apps. When it comes to Ionic, there are actually a few levels to what can be considered an Ionic app builder.

For mobile app development, 86% of developers prefer using Ionic.

Approximately 5 million apps are built with the Ionic framework.

Uses of Ionic

1. Hybrid mobile app development

2. MVC mobile apps

3. Native wrapper

4. Cross-platform mobile application development

5. Hardware functionality enabled app

6. high-performance UX/UI applications

Ionic Pros and Cons

Ionic development services have become quite popular to develop low-budget applications. With top features and several benefits offered, Ionic platform is favored by developers of small businesses and students. However, it also comes up with some drawbacks. Let’s read on further to understand more pros and cons of the Ionic framework.

Pros

1. Ionic has a platform-independent framework that reduces the time, resources, and effort needed to develop a cross-platform app while giving a native look as well as feel to the app.

2. Ionic uses a capacitor that saves development time. When you hire professional Ionic developers, they will help you create simple interfaces to access native API and native SDK on platforms.

3. Ionic is a developer-friendly tool that allows you to create a single codebase using conversant JavaScript frameworks and libraries, thus decreasing code rewrites.

4. Ionic scales efficiently as the total active users do not affect performance.

Cons

1. Though Ionic has plenty of plugins; app developers have to create highly-specific features.

2. Since Hot Reloading is absent, the app refreshes whenever developers make any changes, thus affecting the total speed of development.

3. Security threats are real as older versions do not deliver code uglification.

4. Ionic performance is not suitable for memory – both complex and intensive applications – because it uses WebView for rendering apps. Using Ionic to build a heavy app could make it slow and sluggish.

The Comparison Between Flutter vs Ionic

Now that you have gained a basic understanding of Flutter and Ionic, now is the time to compare the two along a few important dimensions. This will help you decide which one is right for your project.

Performance: Flutter vs Ionic

1. For one, Google Flutter provides comparatively better app performance than its competitors.

2. Flutter platform does not need a bridge of communication between its native modules as native components are available by default.

3. A performance test indicated that the app “hello world” performed best at 60 FPS, taking not more than 16ms to render a frame. Also, it ensured fewer frame drops.

4. While comparing Flutter vs Ionic performance, Flutter framework has Skia graphic library that ensures the UI is redrawn every time with any change in an application view.

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Ionic is a preferred cross-platform framework that rose to fame in 2019. Since then, the number of apps developed using Ionic Framework has also increased by 53.3%.

1. Comparing Ionic vs Flutter performance, Ionic provides 60FPS on desktop and mobile. Using pre-existing plugins offers a hybrid approach that can speed up development.

2. Ionic framework interactive time is less than 1.8 seconds. The latest Ionic version is up to 2x faster than the previous version.

3. Even though Ionic is a non-native framework, it excels in offering hardware accelerated changes, pre-rendering and touch-optimized gestures.

Modularity: Ionic vs Flutter

Modularization in app development indicates a particular framework’s capability or extent, allowing people with different experiences and technical skills to work on a project. For example, an extensive application with an incoherent code structure could take a long time to build.

One of the best features of flutter is, it provides better accessibility to ensure team diversity and project code division into various sub package system models. The team can build multiple modules with the plugin capacity and add or make changes to the codebase.

Ionic also supports modularity using the NgModule class by Angular. App developers can construct various components using modules and combine them to form an application structure containing one root module for bootstrapping. Besides, feature modules are created to allow lazy component loading when needed.

Architecture: Ionic vs Flutter

Choosing an appropriate architectural framework simplifies the development process. It also aids applications and offers support in future updates.

Flutter supports a layered architecture. Simple applications built on these frameworks’ hierarchy begin with the function called top-level root, which is also called platform-specific widgets. It follows basic widgets interacting with one platform while rendering many layers. Besides, animation gestures transfer API calls to the application foundation, also called Scaffold powered by C/C++ engines and platform-specific embedders.

Developers who want a separate presentation layer and business logic may use Flutter BLoC – this architecture is easier to use and create complicated applications with simple and minor components.

Ionic architecture is based on Angular JS MVC – a typical software design including Model View Controller. It is used to build classy single-page and multi-page cross-platform apps for all types of mobile devices. The architecture allows multiple developers to work on the same app simultaneously. As a result, it reduces the overall turnaround time of development while increasing productivity. Moreover, the Ionic architecture allows developers to create multiple views, and the application is immune to recurrent iterations.

Flutter vs Ionic Developers: Hiring Efficient Developers

Regardless of Flutter or Ionic’s pros and cons, you must hire experienced developers to start a project.

Ionic experts charge between $40 and $70 per hour. Their hourly rate varies based on experience and skillsets. The same applies to Flutter.

To hire flutter app developers could cost between $35 and $65 per hour. Even big projects of BMW and Alibaba required less than five developers to build applications using Flutter. Even new developers can easily understand codes. Moreover, as Dart and Flutter’s training expenses are economical, even novice developers can be trained easily.

But there is a disclaimer here. Professional and experienced developers can save a lot of your time because they know exactly how much effort to put into the practice to deliver a brilliant mobile app using Flutter or Ionic.

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Final Comparison: Ionic vs Flutter

Let’s make it much simple for you. Here’s a quick round-up of the Flutter vs Ionic to understand their comparison better.

• While talking about Flutter vs Ionic, Flutter uses Dart as a programming language developed by Google, whereas Ionic primarily uses JavaScript, with Angular, React, or Vue frameworks.

• While talking about the performance of Flutter and Ionic, Flutter is faster than Ionic due to native compilation and custom rendering engine, whereas Ionic may have a lower performance compared to Flutter since it relies on WebView and web technologies.

• Talking about the difference between Flutter vs Ionic, Flutter has its own rendering engine, which allows for consistent UI across all platforms, while Ionic uses a WebView for rendering, making it dependent on the browser’s rendering engine.

• Talking about Ionic vs Flutter, Ionic uses Cordova or Capacitor plugins to access native device features, which may add an extra layer of complexity, while Flutter provides native access through platform channels for direct communication with native code.

• Flutter has a wide range of pre-designed widgets that mimic native components, whereas Ionic uses standard web components styled to look like native components, leveraging CSS for customization.

Who Won the Battle – Flutter or Ionic?After reading every point in this article, we hope this detailed information may have made your thoughts very clear about the difference and similarities between Ionic and Flutter. Here, we have cleared every aspect of Flutter while comparing it with the Ionic framework.The decision to go for a particular framework is always hard. Still, if you are clear about your business objectives and user requirements, it makes the decision process a lot easier. However, if the application structure is complex, it is best to hire dedicated ionic developers. Similarly, if your project has a complicated user requirement, always hire an expert team for Flutter app development.In the end, your preference for selecting a framework should be based on which business objective you align with, where and how you plan to launch your app, and what skills you have now or want to learn in the future. So, the best way to get insight is to connect with a professional mobile application development company, Radixweb. Our expert consultants will guide you through the right path and help you choose the suitable technology.So share your requirements or business ideas without thinking twice!