Likelihood to Recommend It is suitable for making portable applications, with almost the same code for several platforms. You can access native features of the device or use an open source plug-in from the repository to create a local database and access the internal storage of the device. It is wonderful for the construction of a native application, through the use of standard web code. It is not recommended for enterprise applications.
Read full review I do not think I can recommend Appcelerator at this point due to the issues with Appcelerator studio, lack of good debugging support, lack of thorough documentation and forums and the additional cost overhead of licenses. The pros are just that it allows for cross-platform development. However,
Cordova does a much better job of it and excels at places where Appcelerator currently struggles
Read full review Pros Cordova makes it very easy to develop apps for multiple platforms. The setup is very simple when it comes to creating a project, adding platforms, building and deploying apps. If you have a little mobile app development experience, all you need to know is HTML, CSS, Javascript and only a handful of cordova commands to get started with your hybrid app. Cordova provides a simple solution to access any and all of the device features through native plugins. You have a host of third-party and cordova plugins available to use device features like filesystem, camera, health kit, location services etc. You can also write your very own plugins and use them for your cordova based apps. Cordova is free to use! The only cost you will bear is the individual mobile platform developer program enrollment cost to deploy your apps to those platforms. Read full review Adds structure to your code through Alloy framework. Easy to integrate with iOS SDK and to build and run iOS apps. Read full review Cons Needs to be fully compatible with mobile machines Support for a wide variety of platforms Needs better backwards compatibility Read full review It is very hard to debug your code. Breakpoints never worked for us even with the latest Appcelerator Studio and we had to rely on log statements to debug. There is a need to purchase licenses from Appcelerator to run the code on a device or for creating iOS distribution builds. This is an additional cost when you have already paid for Apple developer program for precisely these things. If things are broken due to lack to support between Appcelerator and a new iOS version, you pretty much have to rely on a new version release from Appcelerator for the issue to be fixed. It is difficult to create enterprise distribution builds where the distribution certificate is owned by your organization's team and you only have a development certificate for the same. The forums on developer.appcelerator.com are seldom helpful. It is hard to find solutions for issues even on other forums like stack overflow. Documentation needs to be improved. Read full review Alternatives Considered Apache Cordova is the mother of all other frameworks. The Ionic developed framework is well suited for development but most of their features are offered by paid services. As Apache Cordova is open source and has a license to modify it, it has no legal problems to work with it. Also, most well-known IDEs recognize the Apache Cordova snippets.
Read full review Appcelerator makes you write a structured code whereas
Cordova just packages your code and you are free to structure it. Appcelerator bridges your javascript code with native code and that would make it run faster than javascript code in
Cordova apps. However, with recent mobile browsers, you would hardly notice any performance deterioration with
Cordova apps. Appcelerator struggles with issues related to its IDE, debugging, documentation and forums and additional costs.
Cordova makes it much more simpler to develop cross-platform apps with better developer support, debugging support, documentation and forums minus the additional costs.
Read full review Return on Investment It has a positive impact in general. Cordova is really a great solution for web developers who want to bring their incredible ideas to devices, but they just do not have a lot of time to put into iOS and Android learning curves. Our biggest benefit was that the management of images for multiple devices. Developing with Cordova has drastically reduced the cost of cross-platform deployment. Read full review We were able to build and deploy a mobile app with Appcelerator. However, the platform still has issues and does not cover our needs as much as some of its competitor like cordova does. Read full review ScreenShots