.NET vs. Xamarin

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
.NET
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft's .Net is an open source, freeware application infrastructure.N/A
Xamarin
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
N/AN/A
Pricing
.NETXamarin
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Xamarin
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
.NETXamarin
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
.NETXamarin
Considered Both Products
.NET
Chose .NET
I have used Java and .NET seems to be a more solid development ecosystem As time has gone on they have improved their cross-platform capabilities and deeply improved their support for the open-source community.
Xamarin

No answer on this topic

Best Alternatives
.NETXamarin
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Swiftify
Swiftify
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
.NETXamarin
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(27 ratings)
7.0
(12 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(7 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
9.7
(8 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
.NETXamarin
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
.NET is well suited for any general purpose solution to a business problem, though if we are talking strictly the framework version - you have to be more or less tied to Microsoft Windows to run it. If this isn't a problem, then it will be able to address and solve any programming project you have.
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Microsoft
If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and effort from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, Windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done.
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Pros
Microsoft
  • Visual Studio is one of the best IDEs and .NET is the best framework to use with Visual Studio.
  • There is a large network of support for the .NET framework.
  • The .NET framework encompasses a very large area of the programming stack.
  • The .NET framework is flexible and can be used for desktop applications or web development.
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Microsoft
  • Xamarin allows you to write cross platform code. This allows companies to build apps more quickly by writing less code. Having code abstracted and reused across multiple platforms allows for more testing and less issues overall.
  • The ability to use Visual Studio is a huge plus. Visual Studio is one of the best IDE's available and being able to write cross platforms apps while in a great IDE makes everything less painful.
  • Xamarin is now free with a large company backing. This means that bugs on the platform get fixed more quickly and there is a large community of developers.
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Cons
Microsoft
  • .NET is heavily Microsoft Windows oriented, and while .NET core tried to resolve that with MacOS and Linux support, .NET Core is still waiting for wider adoption.
  • While free for small projects, additional features for big projects can be a little expensive.
  • Can be resource-heavy upon deployment. We continuously have our more senior staff optimize the code of our junior developers for performance. Other languages are a little bit more forgiving in comparison.
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Microsoft
  • Forms - not 100% there. Still needs work but is production ready.
  • iOS - sometimes errors can be hard to understand, if they even show up.
  • Insights - Xamarin offers their own crash analytics software. However, it's not perfect and sometimes doesn't pick up crashes.
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Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.
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Usability
Microsoft
The full .NET Framework is an amazing thing and is very robust. We have used it to create console apps, Windows apps, and online apps. When coupled with Visual Studio, development, testing, building, and deploying our applications has become 100 times easier as compared to doing those things manually before. The automation of this process has helped us push out changes to our applications faster to adapt to the ever-changing business requirements.
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Microsoft
If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done
Read full review
Support Rating
Microsoft
You don't often need to reach out to Microsoft for .NET support. If you do, there are forums and websites that have active Microsoft support folks where you can provide feedback or get help. Microsoft support in general is quite good as well, but not cheap. The best support is from the community like StackOverflow.
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Microsoft
I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow
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Implementation Rating
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
The .NET platform has a much longer and broader history than Laravel, so we chose to go with it as the support will be far superior. Additionally, Laravel is tied to PHP, while you can use multiple different languages in .NET. The additional flexibility that .NET provides in the range of types of applications you can build with it sealed the deal.
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Microsoft
Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom. Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.
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Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • There are few factors we needed for our custom development. Below are each of them. We were able to get a satisfactory outcome for each of these factors which made .NET platform a very good choice in developing enterprise applications.
  • Reusability of codes- Microsoft has given many re-usable codes and components in the framework to help developers do their job effortlessly. With the help of default features, developers can create end-to-end solutions and make the business operations more efficient. As codes and components are reusable, .NET reduces development time and if applications take less time to develop, they cost cheaper and you get faster return on investment.
  • Easy to maintain- Development cost is one time, but maintenance cost is incurring. .NET apps are easily maintainable, thanks to the configuration settings that can be modified without any need to rewrite the code.
  • Deployment is hassle free- Deploying software is always challenging and the most common problem developers face in this process is the existence of multiple DLLs. It’s hard to make sure that all DLLs will co-exist in the same machine. .NET framework solves this problem by allowing different versions of the same DLL to exist side-by-side on the same machine.
  • Security- .NET is one of the most secure web and application development frameworks available in the market. As it’s made by Microsoft, you can be absolutely sure about the security measurements. Hackers can never steal valuable data from your website or apps.
  • Cross platform friendly- What if you had developed an app for desktop and laptop computers and now after seeing the growth of mobile apps in the market, you want it in mobile version as well? You can easily develop an app that runs on the desktop and PDA without any issue. As you can re-use the codes and utilize the same development environment, your job becomes a lot simpler.
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Microsoft
  • Saves development time and deliver fast.
  • Allows inhouse developers build both Android and iOS application without switching languages.
  • Allows use coding in C# in Visual studio IDE from which we can code in different languages. We don't need multiple IDEs installed
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