Airship vs. NativeScript

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Airship
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
The Airship Experience Platform provides an end-to-end solution for unifying experiences across channels and capturing value across the entire customer lifecycle.N/A
NativeScript
Score 4.8 out of 10
N/A
NativeScript is an open source framework that allows you to create native iOS and Android apps, with one codebase, using ​the web skills you already have (JavaScript and CSS) and ​the libraries you already love​.N/A
Pricing
AirshipNativeScript
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AirshipNativeScript
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsThe NativeScript framework and CLI are completely free and open source. NativeScript Sidekick is a free download to improve developer productivity with optional paid tiers for power users.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AirshipNativeScript
Best Alternatives
AirshipNativeScript
Small Businesses
OneSignal
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Score 8.0 out of 10
Visual Studio
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Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
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Score 9.0 out of 10
Visual Studio
Visual Studio
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
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Score 9.0 out of 10
Visual Studio
Visual Studio
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AirshipNativeScript
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(18 ratings)
4.8
(13 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(1 ratings)
1.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
AirshipNativeScript
Likelihood to Recommend
Airship (formerly Urban Airship)
Well-Suited for: 1. Mobile App Notifications: Ideal for targeted push notifications in apps. 2. Customer Segmentation: Effective for personalized marketing campaigns based on user data. 3. Event-Triggered Automation: Great for automated messaging based on user actions. 4. A/B Testing: Useful for optimizing campaign messages and strategies. Less Appropriate for: 1. Non-Mobile Channels: Less effective if the primary focus is on non-mobile communications like email or direct mail. 2. Basic Email Marketing: Other platforms might be better suited for simple, broad email campaigns without complex segmentation or personalization needs.
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Progress Software Corporation
I gotta be honest, after a PoC period, we choose to rewrite the whole application in a different cross-platform app. Our developers had to invest a lot of time and effort to debug a lot of plugin-related issues, which we needed to utilize the android mobile phone capabilities. QR reader, special visualizations, and fine-tuning were really hard and often resulted in writing native Android code instead of using the shared Angular code. In the end, we think that writing a standalone Android app and an Angular app would have been a better alternative, as the shared code base was so unreliable that it did not save us any time.
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Pros
Airship (formerly Urban Airship)
  • The marketing push notifications are very effective, and it gives us free hand to define different business criteria to target user groups
  • The user experience or the message content could differ from Android and iOS, and this is a huge benefit for us
  • As an Architect, troubleshooting an issue is very detailed and the time it takes to troubleshoot an issue is considerably less from our previous product
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Progress Software Corporation
  • True native app. The app uses native components and that is quite noticeable in the overall performance of the app. NativeScript is also awesome in the way we can access the native APIs, so we are never really constrained by the framework. If we need, we can just dive into the native APIs without leaving our environment and language (JS).
  • Cross-platform. Builds for Android and iOS. It deals with the platforms differences very well.
  • Support for Vue.js. Even though it is just a community effort, the NativeScript-Vue plugin is the best alternative to build native Apps with Vue.js. That was a major factor to go with NativeScript.
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Cons
Airship (formerly Urban Airship)
  • The automated A/B testing winner selection and application should be added
  • The flexibility of message shape, specifically incorporating transparency so messages do not need to be a rectangular shape
  • Faster and more reliable servers around the globe
  • Making more detailed use cases and tutorials to be followed can simplify things for users
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Progress Software Corporation
  • The need to know the native Android and iOS APIs to access device hardware and other platform-specific functionality
  • Not all user interface components are available for free
  • NativeScript has no HTML and DOM, which requires some deep knowledge of different UI tools to be implemented instead
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Likelihood to Renew
Airship (formerly Urban Airship)
No answers on this topic
Progress Software Corporation
The hybrid is ok but native is better for performance and the right use case I want to go for is the performance without dealing with too many development tools.
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Usability
Airship (formerly Urban Airship)
The interface takes a bit getting used to in order to know how to take advantage of everything. Some of the analytics that are available are particularly hard to find, so it's important to pay attention when customer support reviews everything, but everything I'd want and need in terms of Push and In-App messaging is all there.
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Progress Software Corporation
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Airship (formerly Urban Airship)
I have not had to interact much with customer support as I have been able to find the vast majority of the answers I'm looking for within their documentation, which I very much appreciate because it saves me a lot of time. Customer support has been responsive and helpful for the most part during the couple of interactions I've had.
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Progress Software Corporation
The community support is excellent.
They have a slack community as well as a discourse forum
forum.nativescript.org
Both of these offer community driven support.
The forum is more for a threaded discussion. The slack community is more for a quick talk.
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Alternatives Considered
Airship (formerly Urban Airship)
We've tested a bunch of different CRM tools over the years and Airship has been a winner for its functionality, features, cost, and ability to integrate with other softwares that we use. It has been great for SMS and mobile in particular. It could certainly be a one stop shop for CRM.
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Progress Software Corporation
Ionic Ionic is an excellent Angular-based framework for mobile, and it does give a lot of access to the native device api's. However, the technology is based on Cordova, which means the apps being built are just webviews, with html, css and JS all running on the UI thread, and potentially creating very slow experiences for users. NativeScript is a truly native solution, and so provides a faster user experience. ReactNative We evaluate ReactNative, and found it much the same as NativeScript. The main difference is that your JS is all written with React, while NativeScript lets you choose between normal JS, Angular, and Vue. For our team, Angular was the most appropriate choice.
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Return on Investment
Airship (formerly Urban Airship)
  • The ROI has increased more than approx. 50% (exact details to be confirmed) based on cross-channel orchestration
  • Using push notifications alone, we have seen a huge increase in app engagement which was a challenge before to nudge users to get back to the App after initial download
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Progress Software Corporation
  • The poor quality of NativeScript documentation has the potential to weigh heavily on development timelines, budgets, and QA resources in a NEGATIVE manner.
  • The poor interoperability of NativeScript plugins can significantly increase development time.
  • The need to seek out professional instruction to learn how to use NativeScript effectively may become a burden on your budget.
  • The number of breaking changes between versions of NativeScript, may cause your development efforts to lag further behind the most recent releases of NativeScript and your other chosen environments than you are accustomed to.
  • NativeScript still does not support the latest major version of Angular. Any significant changes to the other environment components of your systems may hold you back even further while NativeScript plays catch-up.
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ScreenShots

Airship Screenshots

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NativeScript Screenshots

Screenshot of Example of a styled NativeScript list viewScreenshot of Charts and graphs available as part of NativeScript UIScreenshot of Groceries – the app you build as part of the getting started tutorialScreenshot of Leverage native mapping systems with NativeScript