Flutter vs Angular – Which is better?

Most app developers face an annoying dilemma: which app development framework should they choose to accomplish their app development project?

For ages, the Angular framework was a preferred choice for app developers. But Flutter is the latest development that has occupied the technological space by storm.

This article states the features and advantages of Flutter and Angular to make the selection process easier for app developers. Read on to know them.

Key Takeaways

• Flutter is a cross-platform SDK ideal to build Android / iOS apps

• Angular is a framework for building scalable web applications

• Flutter and Angular are free to use and open-source

What is Flutter?

Flutter is an open-source software development kit housed from Google. It aids the speedy development of attractive cross-platform mobile applications.

Flutter’s pre-built unique Cupertino widgets and Material designs delight users with smooth, natural scrolling, platform awareness, and rich motion application programming interfaces.

An extraordinary feature of Flutter that differentiates it from other industry-leading app development frameworks is the Hot Reload feature. Users can experience reload times within seconds without losing control on simulators, hardware, and emulators with this incredibly functioning feature.

Also, Flutter helps developers focus on building beautiful UIs and delivering user-friendly apps by dragging and dropping features from layered architecture that allows for complete customization and results in high-speed rendering.

With Flutter, cross-platform applications achieve unmatched fame in modern times with the growing business needs and skyrocketing competition. Compelling components like widgets, libraries, development tools, and foundations characterize Flutter.

It is a trustworthy framework that significantly reduces developer’s effort and helps them build apps that intuitively run on various platforms with uniformity, attractiveness, and dynamicity. 

Flutter Core Features

Flutter is increasingly becoming prominent in the ever-growing competitive environment as a superior mobile SDK, and the major player behind this has been GitHub. Some of the exciting features of Flutter are:

• Flutter is an open-source app development platform

• Developers have written Flutter using a robust object-oriented programming language known as Dart. 

• Flutter offers widgets that incorporate a range of vital differences that can be customized as per user requirements. Flutter comprises two kinds of widgets- Cupertino widgets and Material Design widgets.

• It has its architecture based on reactive programming

Advantages of Flutter

Flutter aids in the smooth development of handy mobile applications. Here is how:

• Incredibly fast app development

With notable features like Hot Reload, any changes made in Flutter code are instantly reflected on the screen as the developers make alterations. The best part about using this feature is that developers can make changes while writing code without starting everything from scratch.

The Hot Reload usually never takes more than milliseconds to reflect the changes on the developer’s screen, helping them to maintain dynamicity and high speed for mobile application development. Likewise, flutter’s rich set of widgets assist developers in creating native interfaces within a few seconds.

• Swift running of cross-platform applications

Flutter apps offer smooth scrolling experiences while in use, barely causing any cuts or hangs.

• Access to native features

Flutter is extremely easy to set up. In addition, flutter offers a range of easily accessible features that developers can ship into apps. And since flutter is cross-platform in nature, developers can conveniently reuse the code written in existing Objective-C, Swift, Java, etc.

• Amazing user interfaces

With pre-built design-centric widgets, advanced application programming interfaces, high-end development tools, and scrolling and navigation features, Flutter aids in the development of expressive and stunning user interfaces.

• Reactive framework

With Flutter’s reactive framework, developers need not update user interface contents manually. Instead, once they update the variable, the user interface changes will be automatically visible.

• Decreased efforts of app testing

The benefit of using Flutter to create cross-platform applications comes into existence when a developer needs to test apps on various platforms. Since Flutter applications are cross-platform applications, the tester need not run the same tests on different platforms, such as Android and iOS, for the same apps.

These cross-platform apps can be written using a single code base, and developers need to write the programming code only once and can run them on different platforms. Therefore, app developers use the Flutter framework extensively for faster testing and deployment of mobile apps.

What is Angular?

Angular is a free and open-source, TypeScript-based mobile and web application building platform. Angular helps you to develop apps across various platforms.

All you need to do is learn a particular way of building apps with a single code base and reuse them to develop apps for any deployment target (web, native mobile, native desktop, and mobile web).

With Angular, developers can achieve the maximum speed required to develop apps and take it further through server-side rendering and Web Workers. Also, Angular enables you to analyze and examine app scalability statistics and correspondingly meet huge organizational requirements.

With Angular, you can build simple to complex features with declarative templates. You can also extend the language of templates with your components and use them to create customized apps. In addition, you will receive Angular-specific feedback ad help with every editor and IDE.

With all these fantastic features coming together in a single development platform, you can focus on creating a lucrative and user-friendly application rather than only making the code work.

Please refer to Deploying an Angular Project With Containers to learn more how to host an Angular application.

Angular Core Features

• Cross-platform app development

Use the latest website platform capabilities to create progressive web apps with high performance and zero-step and offline installations. Also, build native and desktop-installed applications with the same methods you have learned for the web besides the aptness to access native OS application programming interfaces.

• Speed and performance

Angular helps you generate highly optimized code, thus giving you the advantage of handwritten code with the effectiveness of a framework. Also, Angular uses Component Router to load apps quickly, which facilitates automatic code-splitting for users.

• Productivity

Angular boosts productivity by offering templates, CLIs, and IDEs. Use powerful template syntax to build UIs quickly. Use command-line tools (CLI) to build apps faster, test with compliance, and deploy them instantly. Get instant feedback on errors and intelligent code completion in popular IDEs and editors.

Advantages of Angular

Since its inception, developers have launched several versions of the Angular framework. These versions, all together, have successfully added to the productive working of the framework. Here is how:

• Custom components

Angular allows developers to create their components that can efficiently gather functionality and support logic into metamorphic fragments. These components also go well with website components.

• Data binding

Data binding is a method implied by developers to control page elements of various websites via web browsers. It puts dynamic HTML to use and can be executed without complex programming. Also, data binding offers an improved incremental display of a website.

The Angular framework employs the two-way binding- model state and UI state. The UI state reflects changes made in the model state and vice versa. With Angular, developers can effectively transfer data from JavaScript code to the view and correspondingly react to events showcased by users, not having to write code manually.

• Dependency injection

Angular allows users to put down modular services and incorporate them wherever they are needed. This enhances the reusability and testability of similar services.

• Testing

Testing parts and portions of your app at every stage of the development process is highly recommended. Tests are superior tools, and developers of Angular have developed it from the ground up with testability in mind. 

• Comprehensive

Angular provides unmatched solutions. It is a full-fledged platform for routing within the app, server communication, and more. 

• Browser compatibility

Angular is a cross-platform framework that makes it compatible with several browsers. Developers can build an app with Angular, and it will typically run on a range of browsers, including macOS, Linux, Windows.

Flutter vs Angular Comparison

Conclusion

This article explained the differences and similarities between Flutter and Angular.

Flutter is a cross-platform software development kit from Google, lets developers create high-performance iOS / Android apps, and it is used by companies like Tencent, BMW, and Nubank.

Angular is a modern web development platform. It is exceptionally stable and used by companies like PayPal, Upwork, and Deutsche Bank.

Both technologies are great and the ideal choice will depend upon your project requirements.

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