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.
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Node.js
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Node.js is an open source, asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime, Node.js is designed to build scalable network applications.
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React (React.js)
Score 8.9 out of 10
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React or React.js is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. React enables users to create interactive UIs.
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Pricing
NativeScript
Node.js
React (React.js)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
NativeScript
Node.js
React (React.js)
Free Trial
Yes
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
The 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.
NativeScript was indeed a better experience at first than Ionic. But the real game-changer in 2022 for cross-platform applications is Flutter now. We changed to it shorty after NativeScript, as it is much more stable, more widely supported, has a ton of extra features, and does …
First and foremost, the codebase on which the project application was developed in NativeScript on 90% can be shared with React Native framework. Moreover, the documentation of the framework is extensive in a manner to allow developers the easy low-level entrance for the …
I have use AngularJS and Angular for many years, and when it came time to build a mobile app, I was asked to use Android Studio. I did not have any trouble in developing apps separately with these two technologies. By trying to combine web app development and Android app …
I have several hybrid alternatives like Cordova + jQuery Mobile and ionic (which uses Cordova and angular). These alternatives always let you down in the long run because the performance and "feel" is never comparable to a true native app. Especially when the app's complexity …
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 …
We have previously evaluated Xamarin, and the time it took us to get started, install all of the software, license it, learn Xamarin, and create a app that runs and debugs on connected mobile devices was painful. With NativeScript and the Playground, we're able to get started …
I've looked into and worked with multiple frame works such as Phonegap/Cordova, Ionic, and React Native. While they all allowed developers to create multi-platform applications easily, with different degrees of performance, I found them all to fall short in once you reached a …
Unlike its competitors, NativeScript offers its users 4 architectural choices.
It shines in the area of offering 100% day zero Native API access.
The development experience is great and feels like you are home, if you are a web developer coming from Angular or Vue background, …
I was once a user of Ionic Framework which operates on Apache Cordova. At the time, Ionic was the obvious choice because it was lightyears ahead of the other cross platform frameworks. However, because Ionic Framework and Apache Cordova require a WebView component to function, …
Ionic is based on an embedded WebView running an app looking website in the background. It has been around for a couple years, but it does not compare well to real native applications. In most cases the UI just doesn't have the feel of a real native app, and performance is …
The direct native API access without having to write any Java or ObjC was the ultimate decision for us. We can drop in a native Android/Ios library and instantly code against that SDK without any special work. Whereas with Ionic or RN, you have to write some Java/ObjC (or …
Ionic and Apache Cordova are hybrid tools, both based on Webview which is ok for mobile offline data apps but for high-performance enterprise apps that is the limit. NativeScript can go where the number of rules and processing required force us to gain access to the native …
NativeScript is superior in every way: Vibrant community - there is an open slack channel where you can get advice and talk to other nativescript developers Active development team - The NativeScript development team reaches out to their user base consistently for feature …
There is a smooth and seamless performance for multiple requests as the feedback received from users. and uses one platform to maintain UI and backend.
In my opinion, Node.js is just so much cooler than anything .NET has ever done, even now. It far simpler to get started, you don't need to remember some obtuse class hierarchy which tends to make .NET good so much more complicated than it should need to be. Node.js is faster …
Node.js is easy to use and we don't need to set up the environment for using it as we do for making backend with Django and python, It is also faster and causes less buffering unlike WordPress or other of the kind, and last but not least it is easy to use by beginners as syntax …
This was very difficult because flutter is extremely easy to use and if you have React in the background, it makes it even easier. What makes Flutter a little better is the response, the components are rendered before the loading and that gives the user a better experience. The …
I have also used Angular before coming to React. Web apps created with React are much faster than Angular because React is based on virtual DOM which reloads only those components of the web page that change and everything else remains the same. Angular's learning curve is also …
I have also used Vue, Angular, and Ember for various projects. Out of the three, I am most intrigued by Vue. It takes a more beginner-friendly approach than React and changes some of the abstractions it uses to be more transparent to the user. It also comes with a lot more …
There are other options for building SPAs, and the two most common aside from React are Vue and Angular. React has been the leader of the pack for a while and has been an innovator. Angular is good for companies that want an opinionated framework so that it standardizes …
Like most people, I started in serious client-side web development with the introduction of jQuery, the first robust library for cross-browser DOM manipulation. React provides a much closer WYSIWYG translation from the declarative JSX template to HTML elements compared to using …
While this is a widely contested debate with various blog posts and benchmarks all over the place, its really a personal choice to determine what works for the team. Coming from a Angular 1.x background, I decided to try a new framework when Angular 2.x was announced and at …
When choosing a front-end framework, you have a ton of choices. There are numerous articles that will try to convince you this way or that about which one is better. I have used Blaze as a UI layer for Meteor Application development quite extensively and have found it to …
NativeScript allows to easily integrate with native APIs by threading models. Moreover, the framework itself can be integrated with Angular, VueJS and JavaScript due to the fact that it was built on based on these frameworks. It allows you to easily maintain if you projects are based on these frameworks. Therefore, for the development of cross-platform applications it can be very handy!
If you need a fast, robust and reliable server side framework that allows you to write JS on the backend and therefore have your project in one language - Node.js is a stand out choice. It can easily handle heavy traffic on very little resources (CPU and memory usage is very efficient). I can't recommend it enough, it is such a pleasure to work with - I feel it gave me back my career. I was so bored with the banality of .NET, I had also come to dislike it's overly convoluted and complicated class structure. Node.js was the fresh start I needed, it can be as simple or as complicated as you like - but even at it's most complicated it can still beat the pants off .NET core any day.
React is a JavaScript user interface construction library that works well for:
Developing web apps with dynamic and complicated user interfaces.
creating reusable UI elements that may be used in other applications.
creating single-page applications with dynamic content updates that don't require a page reload.
The Virtual DOM's effective updating mechanism allows it to handle large volumes of data updates.
React, on the other hand, might be less suitable for:
Websites that are simple, stagnant, and have no interaction. Other libraries or simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript may be a better fit in such circumstances.
Web sockets may be a better choice for applications that need real-time updates, such as chat or gaming apps.
When creating mobile apps, React Native is a better option.
Server side rendering only, as React is designed to run on the client side.
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.
Solid backing by large organization (Facebook) thats committed to keeping the development on the project. In my mind, this is the number one priority for any library because without this: time is wasted on getting up-to speed on a library that you will never use, have a codebase with a library thats hard to maintain because few years down the lane, hiring devs to maintain an unsupported library is very difficult.
As with any libraries, open source community's support is critical for success of any framework because this allows for more pre-built components that could be used right out-of-box => makes Development using React a breeze.
React's Stateful and Stateless components make organizing your code a breeze. These components would also allow for writing clean Unit Tests on the logic.
React's component lifecycle. It offers a variety of lifecycle methods, that allows for handling different scenarios of loading and manipulating data in the UI.
I found React's documentation very well maintained with plenty of examples explaining each feature.
Responsiveness is a very important criteria in selecting a UI and React is very responsive. It does some neat optimizations on re-rendering using virtual DOM and would only re-render parts of the DOM that changed. These optimizations makes React Applications feel really fast.
React Native would allow for building applications that span across web and mobile interfaces (iOS and Android). This makes learning React even more enticing, because using a single library, you could build applications that span across Web, iOS and Android.
create-react-app is an effort by Facebook (creators of React) that makes getting started with React really easy. It does all the heavy lifting of configurations for you and allow you to focus on just development.
Small footprint, minified React + React DOM is under 150Kb, that makes loading UI's with react really fast.
React + Enzyme (backed by Airbnb) + Sinon + Mocha + Chai makes unit testing the UI components fun and improves the overall maintainability of the project.
Nativescript runs everything on a single thread. i.e., the UI thread. If you want to offload some processing, you have to use web workers. This experience can be improved in the future releases.
Currently NativeScript only have hot reload when you change the UI file or Css file. There is no hot reload when you change Js/Ts file, unlike Google's Flutter. This is also something which NativeScript will get in the future releases.
In current version of NativeScript, there is no livesync when building with webpack. This feature will be added with NativeScript 4.x. (an RC version for 4.x is already available)
React's state management can get hairy if you have a deeply nested component and need to pass things up or down the tree very far. This is where libraries like Redux come in, however.
The progressive nature of its development and change cycles can leave information outdated online faster than other frameworks. This can make finding help or documentation on 3rd party sites frustrating.
The learning curve on "thinking in React" can be slightly higher than other more familiar patterns of web development.
Building an app in it can be cumbersome to set up with webpack, but things like Create React App can get you going in a jiffy.
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.
There are a few things that may take some getting used to when coming to a modern JS frontend. Tools like Babel and Webpack (or abstractions that hide their details from you) are often a starting point and JSX can be confusing at first. But assuming the developer is already familiar with modern frontend tools, React is a very natural fit and makes creating user interfaces a joy.
My focus has been, and must remain, with obtaining support from web resources over that of paid support programs. Many companies, including those of government agencies, do not have a budget sufficient for paying large sums of money to other organizations to answer questions. Even in cases where an organization did purchase support programs, developers often found that the delays in obtaining responses to development issues was excessive. I give NativeScript the lowest possible rating, due to the fact that their website content is severely outdated and of little use to a developer in a crunch. The NativeScript environment may be far better than I have been able to report, but held back from excelling due to poor support content. Being that I am often asked to push the boundaries in various areas, improper documentation is highly detrimental to a development team, and thuss a review. I would be more than happy to improve this review as the content of the support documentation provided by the NativeScript team makes its way to their website in the form of real-world examples which are applicable to all versions, or at least the most recent versions, of their product.
Node.js is easy and good to use, their support team is also good they always tend to help you, and solve your problem, even we know that Node is free to use and opensource but then also we get support from them but for getting much better results we need to purchase standard or enterprises support provided by them.
Since it's open-source and very popular, the community support for React and related tools and libraries is excellent. There are a lot of people using the same tools, and so issues tend to get fixed quickly and "recipes" are easy to come by. And since it's backed by Facebook, they have a dedicated engineering team working on the progression of React.
NativeScript was indeed a better experience at first than Ionic. But the real game-changer in 2022 for cross-platform applications is Flutter now. We changed to it shorty after NativeScript, as it is much more stable, more widely supported, has a ton of extra features, and does not rely on JavaScript and Android knowledge as much as NativeScript.
There are other options for building SPAs, and the two most common aside from React are Vue and Angular. React has been the leader of the pack for a while and has been an innovator. Angular is good for companies that want an opinionated framework so that it standardizes practices. However, Angular is known to be more difficult to work with and unnecessarily complex. Vue is seen as taking the best from React and Angular, and it is built for incremental upgrades. Vue has a passionate and growing user base, but it hasn't quite caught React in popularity.
We had built this particular app once already, during a 6 month time frame, using Ionic. When we hit the wall, we chose NativeScript, and built the whole app from scratch. We estimated another 6 months, but completed the work in 4 months due to the ease of use.
We have found collaboration with our client much easier because of the simplicity of releases and speed of development.
Having a tool like NativeScript has allowed us to make competitive quotes for mobile app development contracts, where previously that would have been closed to us due to our lack of native development experience. Being able to build iOS apps without a Swift-code expert has opened those doors for us.
Since we're still in the conversion cycle, all the data is not in. But React has had a positive impact on Developer productivity and the ability to produce efficient, highly flexible UX. This in turn, enhances our customer experience, which is generally the most important component of our ROI.
Conversion has been difficult since it requires a change of mindset. Most developers have adapted quite well, but the process has been lengthy, and 2 years in, we are still not fully converted. This essentially is a temporary negative impact on ROI.