Software Alternatives & Reviews

NativeScript VS Ionic

Compare NativeScript VS Ionic and see what are their differences

NativeScript logo NativeScript

Build truly native apps with JavaScript

Ionic logo Ionic

Ionic is a cross-platform mobile development stack for building performant apps on all platforms with open web technologies.
  • NativeScript Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21
  • Ionic Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-12

NativeScript videos

NativeScript VS React Native 2019 | performance | community | plugins

More videos:

  • Review - Which one is best for you? Flutter, React Native, Ionic or NativeScript?
  • Review - 7 Things to Know When Learning NativeScript

Ionic videos

Fitbit Ionic smartwatch review

More videos:

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to NativeScript and Ionic)
Development Tools
41 41%
59% 59
JavaScript Framework
46 46%
54% 54
Javascript UI Libraries
46 46%
54% 54
Developer Tools
36 36%
64% 64

User comments

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Reviews

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

NativeScript Reviews

10 Best Open Source Firebase Alternatives
The native apps you develop use the richness of the mobile platform and offer the performance you need for mobile devices. NativeScript uses native APIs and controls to render, allowing you to create more sophisticated apps compared to using a hybrid approach.
10 Best Tools to Develop Cross-Platform Desktop Apps 
NativeScript doesn’t require Angular or Vue.js but works better when used together for cross-platform app development. This runtime framework implements JavaScript, its superset TypeScript and Angular Native, and can render a variety of apps, be they gaming, streaming, geolocation, or chat apps. The user interface is in XML and CSS. A single, reusable codebase can be applied...
Top JavaScript Frameworks For Mobile App Development
NativeScript is an open-source, cross-platform, free mobile framework that assists in the creation of a truly native Android and iOS mobile apps. These apps can be built with JavaScript, Angular, Vue.js or TypeScript. Programming using NativeScript reduces the development time and lines of code, to a large extent. Many organizations globally have been implementing it because...
Source: medium.com
9 Top JavaScript Mobile Frameworks To Know In 2020
NativeScript is a Telerik invention for building multi-platform native mobile applications from a single code source. The NativeScript site and GitHub page depict the runtime as empowering developers to utilize JavaScript and TypeScript ( even Angular 2.0) to build native apps for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone (using the Windows Universal system) and offer code over the...
Top Cross-Platform App Development Frameworks
Backed by Google, Angular is a dynamic, robust, and powerful framework known for creating web apps, single-page apps, and cross-platform applications. Built using NativeScript, Angular supports native OS APIs that developers can use for creating high-performance apps for Linux, Windows, Mac, iOS & Android (using NativeScript).
Source: www.pangea.ai

Ionic Reviews

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
10 Best Tools to Develop Cross-Platform Desktop Apps 
Ionic is great for developing stunning, hybrid apps with HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, and Angular but requires a Cordova wrapper. It comes equipped with beautiful preloaded simple, declarative design components for elegant UX/UI. Ionic allows for customisation through web components APIs, capacitor for calling Native SDKs from web code, tooling for Live Reload, deployments,...
Top JavaScript Frameworks For Mobile App Development
With a strong focus on performance, design, and animation, Ionic has been one of the popular JavaScript-based mobile application frameworks. It operates on ‘Write once, run anywhere’ concept, a single codebase, and offers a complete app development kit. With Ionic, one can continuously create applications and port them to different locations.
Source: medium.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, NativeScript should be more popular than Ionic. It has been mentiond 18 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.

NativeScript mentions (18)

  • Ask HN: Flutter or React Native?
    I'm curious about this topic as well. I would also add NativeScript[1] in the comparison. [1] https://nativescript.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 8 days ago
  • Svelte Native: The Svelte Mobile Development Experience
    This is not so much the Svelte equivalent of React Native as it is just NativeScript (https://nativescript.org). - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Mobile App Development for both iOS and Andriod
    There is also https://nativescript.org/ which would allow you to use Vue (or several other frameworks) to build a mobile app. Used it myself a while back for an iPad app using Vue 2 and it was pretty straightforward. It seems like there have been quite a few improvements since then so might be worth a look. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Updating Expo and React Native sucks
    Anyone who thinks this sucks should try NativeScript with hassle-free update experience, quick build time, HMR, direct access to native apis, use React Native plugins and more. Pick any style you like - vanilla, Angular, Vue, React, Svelte - and easily add some SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose views if you want a and connect it to your JS. Docs are a bit behind at the moment but a major update is in progress.... Source: about 1 year ago
  • The right way to build multi platform apps in 2023 using web tech. ?
    There are layers that offer access to native APIs like capacitor, cordova and nativescript. Apparently sometimes multiple of them should be used, but I didn't understand what are the differences even after reading the announcement. These seem to be frontend agnostic technologies and Capacitor is apparently the more modern choice at the moment. Source: about 1 year ago
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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 / 3 months 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: 9 months 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 2 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 / about 2 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 3 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

React Native - A framework for building native apps with React

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

Onsen UI - HTML5 Hybrid Mobile App UI Framework - work with Angular, React, Vue, Meteor & pure JavaScript. Material & Flat design.

BuildFire - BuildFire is the easiest way for small businesses to build a mobile app in a matter of minutes for iOS and Android.

PhoneGap - Easily create apps using the web technologies you know and love: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Xamarin - Create iOS, Android and Mac apps in C#