If you are thinking to develop a mobile app for your business, you’ll probably hire Java developers and swift developers, if you want both Android and iOS apps. However, you can consider other alternate tools to build Android, iOS, and Windows apps. Ionic, Xamarin and React Native are some of the examples of such tools. In this blog post, we will dive into an in-depth comparison between Xamarin and React Native.

Throughout this blog, we’ll find answers to these questions: What are the differences between both these frameworks? What are its features? Which is the Best Framework For Your Next App? Let’s dive in.

What is Xamarin?

Xamarin is an open-source mobile app development framework from Microsoft. Xamarin enables .NET developers to build mobile apps for multiple platforms such as Android, iOS, and Windows. With Xamarin, .NET developers can use a single code base (C#) to develop responsive mobile apps.

What is React Native?

Similar to that of Xamarin, React Native is also an open-source mobile app development framework that enables you to develop mobile apps on native platforms such as Android, iOS, and Windows. React Native was developed by Facebook and uses JavaScript and React as its codebase.

Xamarin vs React Native: What are the differences?

Xamarin vs React Native: Statistics

Based on the recent statistics from StackOverflow, Xamarin and React ended up in the top 10 of the most used Frameworks, Libraries, and Tools. When we analyze the below stats, it’s clear that React Native is more popular among developers when compared with Xamarin.

Even if these stack overflow stats are not the best platform to compare both these frameworks, it is highly evident to us that popular trends are favorable for Facebook products.

Source: Stack Overflow

Below you can find the Google Trends comparison of both these frameworks.

Xamarin: What are its features?

Platform independent development is the biggest USP for this framework. The apps you develop using this framework supports Android, iOS, and Windows operating systems.
Code reusability is another feature, Xamarin developers can reuse existing codes and .NET libraries by using this framework.
Xamarin comes with Xamarin. Forms, which makes prototyping more rapid. Developers can use Xamarin. Forms to build a single interface and share it across multiple platforms.

When compared with other frameworks, Xamarin has got a great Integrated Testing Environment. The TestCloud tool that comes along with Xamarin allows developers to test their apps automatically.
By hiring Xamarin developers you can develop a cost-effective mobile app solution for your business.

React Native: What are its features?

React Native has got native controls and native modules, this increases the performance of apps that are built on this framework.
React Native maintains the downward data flow of components. Because of this, components can be edited independently without the influence of child components. Thanks to this feature, the look, and feel of the React Native app can be greatly improved.
The Live Updates feature in React Native enables developers to push updates directly to users’ phones.
React Native comes with a hot reloading feature, this allows mobile developers to see the changes that are made their code in real-time. This saves the time of React Native developers as the need to recompile the code is fully eliminated.

Xamarin vs React Native: IDE

Xamarin

The greatest disadvantage of Xamarin is its lack of flexibility with multiple development environments. Xamarin only supports the development environment from Microsoft (Visual Studio), which is packed with highly useful features and utilities. By using this IDE, developers can accelerate the mobile development process as Visual Studio got all the development tools in one place.

React Native

When compared with Xamarin React Native is highly flexible as far as the IDE is concerned.

React Native allows developers to build mobile apps using multiple IDEs such as Sublime Text, Brackets, Atom, Vim Editor, Deco IDE and so on.

Xamarin vs React Native: Performance

Xamarin

Xamarin gives near-native performance by using platform-specific hardware acceleration.

React Native

When compared with other popular frameworks, React Native delivers rock-solid performance as it is written in native code. Apps that are written using React Native delivers a smoother experience for its users than regular hybrid apps. Switching or migrating to React Native can give your app a more native feel.

Xamarin vs React Native: Integration

The mobile app that you developed will be useless if it can’t interact with the OS and hardware of your mobile device. Let’s see how Xamarin and React Native integrate with OS features, third party libraries, etc.

Xamarin can efficiently bind with Android AARs, Java JARs, multiple iOS frameworks, and iOS static libraries. The main highlight of data binding in Xamarin is that it doesn’t require source code to be available and modified. However, React Native cannot bind with any random code. Let us see what tools can be integrated with both these frameworks.

What tools integrate with React Native?

iOS
Luxon
Shoutem UI
React-Vue
Bitrise
React Native Paper
React VR
Siphon
Bugsnag
AWS Amplify
Nachos UI
AppHub
React VR
React-Virgin

What tools integrate with Xamarin?

.NET
OneSignal
Bitrise
Back4App
Raygun
bitwarden
built.io
GameAnalytics
TestFairy
Pushwoosh
Logify
Ziggeo
React Native Paper
KeeWeb
MailKit

Xamarin vs React Native: Final Verdict

It will be very difficult for us to choose one from this as the best framework for mobile development because both of this framework has impressive features. We’re pretty much sure that both these frameworks can be used to build high-quality apps in less time.

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Xamarin vs React Native: Which is the Best Framework For Your Next App?