Flutter vs. React Native: 5 Reasons Why Flutter Framework is Better

4 minutes read

Published on Jul 9, 2020

Flutter has become one of the most hyped cross native frameworks since its stable release. Nowadays, most of the companies are enthusiastic about flutter. It is mainly because one can develop applications for Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, and web from a single codebase. Despite fast development and flexible UI, many developers still want to hold on to the React Native. Let’s discuss why Flutter Framework is the best followed by a comparison between Flutter and React Native from a developer’s perspective.

What is Flutter?

Flutter, a UI software development kit by Google is known for building impressive, natively compiled apps for web, mobile, and desktop using a single codebase.

Flutter was originally an open-source project for mobile application development. Later it was extended to support platforms like web, Windows, Google Fuchsia and Linux. You might be already aware of Google’s new operating system called Fuchsia. Here, Flutter is the primary source for developing its applications. Recently, Flutter has become more competitive with React Native (Facebook) and Xamarin (Microsoft).

Useful resources:

Why Flutter Framework?

1. Fast Development

Flutter is faster than many other application development frameworks. With its “hot reload” feature, you can experiment, build UIs, add/remove features, test and fix bugs faster. Thus reducing the overall app development time.

2. Expressive and Flexible UI

You can really build beautiful apps in Flutter. Also, the end-user experience is similar to native apps. Flutter has a layered architecture that lets you control every pixel on the screen. Thus, customization is very simple in Flutter. With its powerful composting capabilities, you can overlay and animate graphics, text, video, and other controls without any limitations.

You’ll also find a set of widgets that deliver pixel-perfect experiences on Android and iOS. It enables the ultimate realization of Material Design. Just in case you don’t know, Material.io is Google’s initiative to build beautiful, usable products with Material Components for digital experiences.

Useful resources: Material.io

3. Native Performance

Flutter’s widgets incorporate all critical platform differences such as scrolling, navigation, icons and fonts. This provides a native performance experience on both iOS and Android.

4. Dart Language

Dart programming language is developed by Google and is meant for mobile, desktop, backend and web applications. It is a client-optimized language for fast performing apps on multiple platforms.
Dart is AOT (Ahead Of Time) compiled to fast, predictable, native code, allowing writing almost all of Flutter code in Dart. This makes Flutter extremely fast and customizable. Virtually, everything (including all the widgets) can be customized.

5. Important Flutter Tools

Flutter framework supports many different tools including Android Studio and Visual Studio Code. It also provides support for building apps from the command line. Dart DevTools, which is a new debugging tool, is more flexible and allows runtime inspection. You can also view logs, debug apps and inspect widgets for Flutter App Development.

Widget inspector helps to visualize and explore the tree hierarchy. Flutter uses this for UI rendering.
Timeline view helps you to monitor your application at a frame-by-frame level. You can also identify rendering and computational work in timeline view.
Source-level Debugger: It lets you step through code, set breakpoints and investigate the call stack.
Logging View displays events from the Dart runtime, application frameworks and app-level logging events.

Flutter vs React Native

	Flutter	React Native
Initial Release	2017	2015
Created By	Google	Facebook
Open Source	yes	yes
Programming Language	Dart	JavaScript
Popularity	68,000 Stars on Github (June 2019)	78,400 stars on Github (June 2019)
IDE	Higher compatibility with IntelliJ idea, Visual code studio & Android studio	A wide range of IDE’s and tools support React Native
Documentation	clean and easy to follow	Unclear
Architecture	BLoC	Flux and Redux
Stateful Hot Reloading	Available	Available
Adaptive Components	Components are not adaptive. Need to be configured manually (proprietary widgets)	Some are adaptive automatically (native components)
App Performance	Higher at 60fps animation standard	Lower as it uses JavaScript bridge for initiating interaction
Native Appearance	Better as it has access to the device’s core functionalities	Less due to its dependency on third-party
3D Support	No	Yes
Top apps built using Flutter/React	Xianyu app by Alibaba, Hamilton app for Hamilton Musical, Google Ads app More	Instagram, Facebook, Facebook Ads, Skype, Tesla

Conclusion

React Native is an older framework is quite popular with its stability and developing time. However, React Native and Flutter framework have their own pros and cons. But, both are actively good looking at the features they’re providing.

React Native sounds like a tooling and dependency nightmare, while Flutter sounds like pleasure but still suffering growing pains. From my personal experience, many developers have expressed extreme frustration with React Native at times. Also, Developers have acknowledged that it’s a pleasure to develop apps in Flutter.

From my own experience, I’m strongly leaning towards Flutter.

About the Author: Raviteja Aketi is a Senior Software Engineer at Mantra Labs. He has extensive experience with B2B projects. Raviteja loves exploring new technologies, watching movies, and spending time with family and friends.

Further reading:

Let’s take a trip back in time—2008. Netflix was nothing like the media juggernaut it is today. Back then, they were a DVD-rental-by-mail service trying to go digital. But here’s the kicker: they hit a major pitfall. The internet was booming, and people were binge-watching shows like never before, but Netflix’s infrastructure couldn’t handle the load. Their single, massive system—what techies call a “monolith”—was creaking under pressure. Slow load times and buffering wheels plagued the experience, a nightmare for any platform or app development company trying to scale

That’s when Netflix decided to do something wild—they broke their monolith into smaller pieces. It was microservices, the tech equivalent of turning one giant pizza into bite-sized slices. Instead of one colossal system doing everything from streaming to recommendations, each piece of Netflix’s architecture became a specialist—one service handled streaming, another handled recommendations, another managed user data, and so on.

But microservices alone weren’t enough. What if one slice of pizza burns? Would the rest of the meal be ruined? Netflix wasn’t about to let a burnt crust take down the whole operation. That’s when they introduced the Circuit Breaker Pattern—just like a home electrical circuit that prevents a total blackout when one fuse blows. Their famous Hystrix tool allowed services to fail without taking down the entire platform.

Fast-forward to today: Netflix isn’t just serving you movie marathons, it’s a digital powerhouse, an icon in platform engineering; it’s deploying new code thousands of times per day without breaking a sweat. They handle 208 million subscribers streaming over 1 billion hours of content every week. Trends in Platform engineering transformed Netflix into an application dev platform with self-service capabilities, supporting app developers and fostering a culture of continuous deployment.

Did Netflix bring order to chaos?

Netflix didn’t just solve its own problem. They blazed the trail for a movement: platform engineering. Now, every company wants a piece of that action. What Netflix did was essentially build an internal platform that developers could innovate without dealing with infrastructure headaches, a dream scenario for any application developer or app development company seeking seamless workflows.

And it’s not just for the big players like Netflix anymore. Across industries, companies are using platform engineering to create Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)—one-stop shops for mobile application developers to create, test, and deploy apps without waiting on traditional IT. According to Gartner, 80% of organizations will adopt platform engineering by 2025 because it makes everything faster and more efficient, a game-changer for any mobile app developer or development software firm.

All anybody has to do is to make sure the tools are actually connected and working together. To make the most of it. That’s where modern trends like self-service platforms and composable architectures come in. You build, you scale, you innovate.achieving what mobile app dev and web-based development needs And all without breaking a sweat.

Is Mantra Labs Redefining Platform Engineering?

We didn’t just learn from Netflix’s playbook; we’re writing our own chapters in platform engineering. One example of this? Our work with one of India’s leading private-sector general insurance companies.

Their existing DevOps system was like Netflix’s old monolith: complex, clunky, and slowing them down. Multiple teams, diverse workflows, and a lack of standardization were crippling their ability to innovate. Worse yet, they were stuck in a ticket-driven approach, which led to reactive fixes rather than proactive growth. Observability gaps meant they were often solving the wrong problems, without any real insight into what was happening under the hood.

That’s where Mantra Labs stepped in. Mantra Labs brought in the pillars of platform engineering:

Standardization: We unified their workflows, creating a single source of truth for teams across the board.

Customization: Our tailored platform engineering approach addressed the unique demands of their various application development teams.

Traceability: With better observability tools, they could now track their workflows, giving them real-time insights into system health and potential bottlenecks—an essential feature for web and app development and agile software development.

We didn’t just slap a band-aid on the problem; we overhauled their entire infrastructure. By centralizing infrastructure management and removing the ticket-driven chaos, we gave them a self-service platform—where teams could deploy new code without waiting in line. The results? Faster workflows, better adoption of tools, and an infrastructure ready for future growth.

But we didn’t stop there. We solved the critical observability gaps—providing real-time data that helped the insurance giant avoid potential pitfalls before they happened. With our approach, they no longer had to “hope” that things would go right. They could see it happening in real-time which is a major advantage in cross-platform mobile application development and cloud-based web hosting.

The Future of Platform Engineering: What’s Next?

As we look forward, platform engineering will continue to drive innovation, enabling companies to build scalable, resilient systems that adapt to future challenges—whether it’s AI-driven automation or self-healing platforms.

If you’re ready to make the leap into platform engineering, Mantra Labs is here to guide you. Whether you’re aiming for smoother workflows, enhanced observability, or scalable infrastructure, we’ve got the tools and expertise to get you there.

5 Reasons Why Flutter Framework is Better than React Native