Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Ionic VS Ultralight

Compare Ionic VS Ultralight and see what are their differences

Ionic logo Ionic

Ionic is a cross-platform mobile development stack for building performant apps on all platforms with open web technologies.

Ultralight logo Ultralight

Fast, light HTML UI solution for C++ apps
  • Ionic Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-12
  • Ultralight Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-07-25

Ionic features and specs

  • Cross-Platform Development
    Ionic allows developers to build applications for multiple platforms such as iOS, Android, and the web using a single codebase. This significantly reduces development time and costs.
  • Rich UI Components
    Ionic provides a wide range of pre-built UI components that are customizable and designed to look and feel native on all devices. This makes it easier to create visually appealing and consistent interfaces.
  • Integration with Angular
    Ionic is tightly integrated with Angular, a popular and widely-used front-end framework. This integration provides a robust architecture for building complex applications.
  • Active Community and Extensive Documentation
    Ionic has an active community and extensive documentation, tutorials, and resources. This makes it easier for developers to find support and resolve issues.
  • Cordova and Capacitor Plugins
    Ionic apps can leverage Cordova and Capacitor plugins to access native device features like the camera, GPS, and file system, providing near-native functionality.

Possible disadvantages of Ionic

  • Performance Issues
    Because Ionic uses WebView for rendering, performance can sometimes be inferior to native applications, particularly for highly interactive or graphically intensive applications.
  • Dependency on Third-Party Plugins
    Ionic heavily relies on third-party plugins for accessing native features. If these plugins are not well-maintained or lack support for certain functionalities, it can lead to challenges.
  • Learning Curve
    While Ionic simplifies cross-platform development, it still requires familiarity with web technologies like JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, as well as frameworks like Angular. This could be a steep learning curve for developers not versed in these technologies.
  • File Size
    Ionic applications tend to have a larger file size compared to native applications, mainly due to the inclusion of WebView and other dependencies. This can impact download times and initial load performance.
  • Rendering Delays
    There can be noticeable delays in UI rendering, especially on older devices, due to the abstraction layer that Ionic provides over native components.

Ultralight features and specs

  • Lightweight
    Ultralight is designed to be extremely lightweight, making it ideal for applications where performance and resource usage are critical.
  • Cross-Platform
    The software is built to work across different operating systems, allowing developers to create applications that can run on multiple platforms without significant changes.
  • High Performance
    Ultralight includes optimizations for speed and efficiency, which can enhance the performance of any application using it.

Possible disadvantages of Ultralight

  • Limited Features
    Compared to full-feature browsers or rendering engines, Ultralight might lack certain advanced features or capabilities.
  • Smaller Community
    Being a less mainstream option, Ultralight might have a smaller community, which can impact the availability of community-driven support and resources.
  • Potential Compatibility Issues
    Due to its lightweight nature, some complex web technologies or scripts might not be fully supported, leading to potential compatibility issues.

Analysis of Ionic

Overall verdict

  • Ionic is a good choice for startups, small to medium-sized businesses, and developers who are looking to rapidly build and deploy mobile apps with a consistent look and feel across devices. It is particularly useful when the apps don't require intensive use of native capabilities and where development speed is more important than the performance of strictly native apps.

Why this product is good

  • Ionic is a popular open-source framework used for developing cross-platform mobile applications. It combines HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with front-end frameworks like Angular, React, or Vue to create hybrid applications. Its main advantages are ease of use, a rich component library, and the ability to write once and deploy across multiple platforms, saving time and resources.

Recommended for

  • Developers looking for a single codebase for multiple platforms.
  • Teams that are already proficient in web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
  • Projects that have simple or moderate use of device hardware and native capabilities.
  • Businesses prioritizing rapid development and deployment over maximizing native performance.

Ionic videos

Fitbit Ionic smartwatch review

More videos:

  • Review - Fitbit Ionic Review (IN-DEPTH)
  • Review - Fitbit Versa 2 vs Ionic | Fitness Smartwatch Review (NEW)

Ultralight videos

GTA Ultralight Review

More videos:

  • Review - Alpha-Z1, Ultralight & Havok review! - GTA Online
  • Review - E234 Our Ultralight "Stealth" Glider Customization & Review! - Lets Play GTA 5 Online PC 60fps

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ionic and Ultralight)
Development Tools
77 77%
23% 23
Developer Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Rapid Application Development
JavaScript Framework
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Ionic and Ultralight

Ionic Reviews

Top 10 Flutter Alternatives for Cross-Platform App Development
Ionic is mainly known for its simplicity and, thus, is an appropriate choice for those who have a small team or own startups. The framework is popular for its predesigned UI components, which catalyze the overall development process.
Exploring 15 Powerful Flutter Alternatives
Ionic is an open-source UI framework that uses web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build progressive web and mobile apps. Ionic shines for apps centered around forms, lists, and data. The extensive UI components and flexible layout options facilitate quickly scaffolding up CRM-style interfaces for managing records and inventory without needing to style every...
Should I use Moxly to create Ionic apps faster? Ionic vs Moxly
It’s always important that an app is responsive and especially important with Ionic, which is designed to reach multiple platforms with one codebase. This is not supported by Moxly, which is not good in the realm of Ionic. That’s where things look different again with Ionic. There you can create Responsive Apps and websites.
THE BEST 34 APP DEVELOPMENT SOFTWARE IN 2022 LIST
One codebase. Any platform. Now in React and Angular. Ionic Framework is an open-source mobile UI toolkit for building high-quality, cross-platform native and web app experiences. Move faster with a single codebase, running everywhere. Free and open-source, Ionic offers a library of mobile-optimized UI components, gestures, and tools for building fast highly interactive apps.
Android Studio Alternative
Ionic framework is an open-source UI toolkit that allows web technologies to be used to create high-quality mobile and desktop applications. Ionic architecture is based on the user interface or user experience of the application. It’s simple to understand, integrate, or utilize without a front frame using a simple script that incorporates other libraries or frameworks like...
Source: www.educba.com

Ultralight Reviews

We have no reviews of Ultralight yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Ultralight should be more popular than Ionic. It has been mentiond 33 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Ionic mentions (10)

  • Hello from Team OutSystems!
    As you may remember, Ionic, the company where I’ve worked as a Developer Advocate for the past year and a half, was acquired in late 2022 by OutSystems. As part of that acquisition, I’m excited to announce that I transitioned to a Lead Developer Advocate position on the OutSystems side of the house this past November. In my new role, I will continue doing what I love – making it easier for developers to build... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Best Programming language to create Mobile Application ?
    You're looking for a framework to build a progressive web app. Such as Ionic: https://ionic.io/. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • What is this type of styling called?
    Some website's that I've collected that use the styling I'm on about; Ionic.io, spline.design, wickedbackgrounds.com, coolbackgrounds.io,. Source: about 3 years ago
  • Android Games with Capacitor and JavaScript
    In the past I would have used something like Cordova, but this new thing from the folks at Ionic has TypeScript support out of the box for their native APIs and support for using any Cordova plugins you might miss. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
  • 10 Reasons to Choose Ionic for Mobile Development
    Ionic is the only cross-platform development stack that has Enterprise support and integrations for teams building employee and customer-facing apps. Ionic offers dedicated support, security features like Biometrics and Single Sign-on, and cloud services for remote app updates, app builds, and app store distribution. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
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Ultralight mentions (33)

  • Lightpanda: The headless browser designed for AI and automation
    Another browser in this space is https://ultralig.ht/, it's geared for in-game UI but I wonder how easy it would be to retool it for a similar use case. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Verso – web browser built on top of the Servo web engine
    All mainstream web browsers are bloated and use a lot of resources. I am looking for a tiny lightweight web browser with good HTML5 support but without bloat for older computers. Servo, Ladybird and Ultralight (https://ultralig.ht) are promising. I even started developing Qt Ultralight Browser. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Ode to the M1
    What I'd really like to see with CEF et al, is JS being dropped, in favor of directly controlling the DOM from the host language. Then we could, for example, write a Rust (or Kotlin, Zig, Haskell, etc) desktop application that simply directly manipulated the DOM, and had it rendered by a HTML+CSS layout engine. Folks could then write a React-like framework for that language (to help render & re-render the DOM in... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • Ode to the M1
    > I hope Electron/CEF die soon, and people get back to building applications that don't consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM to render a hello world. Web technologies are fine, but what we really need is some kind of lightweight browser which allows you to use HTML/CSS/JS, but with far lower memory usage. I found https://ultralig.ht/ which seems to be exactly what I am looking... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • Anselm's Jazz Distributed Infrastructure Framework
    I'm curious if the project will be open-source or do you have plans to go the Awesomium/Ultralight route with both open/closed sources and volume licenses? Or do you plan to offer commercial support services like other open source software? Source: almost 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Ionic and Ultralight, you can also consider the following products

React Native - A framework for building native apps with React

Sciter - Embeddable HTML/CSS/script engine

Apache Cordova - Platform for building native mobile applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript

Electron - Build cross platform desktop apps with web technologies

NativeScript - Build truly native apps with JavaScript

Coherent GT - Fast user interface runtime for PC and Consoles