Xamarin vs Flutter

We will evaluate Xamarin vs. Flutter based on the following criteria:

Performance

Popularity

Development languages

Components

Code reuse

Pricing

Support and ecosystem

Xamarin vs. Flutter: Performance

Cross-platform frameworks tend to severely degrade application performance compared to their native counterparts. That's why it's important to evaluate the difference in performance so as not to degrade the user experience for the sake of cross-platform portability.

As we've emphasized throughout this article, Flutter, thanks to its intelligent strategy of outperforming compilation, exhibits excellent performance compared to almost all current cross-platform frameworks.

Flutter is known to generate performance metrics almost like a native application, so if you want to build an efficient application, Flutter should be your choice.

Xamarin vs. Flutter: Popularity

Because Xamarin is several years older than Flutter, it is used in a wider range of projects.

However, according to a 2022 StackOverflow developer survey, Flutter is much more beloved than Xamarin. Also, when developers were asked to vote for a technology they don't currently use but are interested in developing applications, Flutter came in second place.

However, Xamarin's popularity has declined since 2020, as the number of respondents who like Xamarin has dropped from 45.4% to 38.53%. This means that you will have a harder time finding the right Xamarin developer than the right Flutter developer.

Xamarin vs. Flutter: Development Languages

Every time you need to learn a new development language to start using a new framework, it increases the learning curve. If a framework requires learning a brand new language that is barely used outside of the framework, it's best to think twice before investing your time in it.

Xamarin uses .NET languages such as C# and F#. These are popular languages that have several uses outside of Xamarin. So you should spend the time and resources to learn these languages. In particular, upgrading to C# will open many doors for you as a developer.

Dart, on the other hand, is a relatively new language that was originally introduced to work alongside JavaScript in Chrome. It later shifted its focus to compiling JavaScript to create client-side applications, and that's where Dart overlaps with Flutter.

Since then, Dart has become widely known as the Flutter programming language. Today, it is rarely used as a technology in its own right.

If you are new to the Dart and .NET languages, the difference in their learning curves doesn't matter much.

However, the .NET languages are more widely used than Dart, and Dart not only adds a learning curve for developers, but also creates a lock-in situation. Learning Dart will only benefit you in the context of Flutter development.

In an ever-changing industrial market, it's worth considering whether it's worth spending time learning Dart at all.

Xamarin vs. Flutter: Components

Flutter comes with excellent collections of UI components in both Material and Cupertino. This makes the developer's job easier and eliminates the need to worry about styling the application.

On the other hand, Xamarin.Forms offers a detailed cross-platform UI toolkit consisting of UI components that look and feel like native components, but can be used in cross-platform customization.

Once you decide to use them in your application, these components will be compiled into their in-platform variants. If you want more control over how your app looks, you can try Xamarin.iOS or Xamarin.Android.

Both frameworks go toe-to-toe when it comes to component support. You can't go wrong with either Flutter or Xamarin.

Xamarin vs. Flutter: Code Reuse

Code reuse is a fundamental feature of cross-platform application development. Therefore, when choosing a cross-platform development environment, you need to consider this factor.

Flutter allows you to write common code for both platforms, but it also has plenty of room for platform-specific differences. This means you'll have to write a lot of platform-specific code to make your Flutter application work well on all platforms.

Xamarin, on the other hand, prides itself on allowing developers to reuse up to 90 percent of their application code. With packages like Xamarin.Form, Xamarin makes code sharing easy.

Xamarin vs. Flutter: Pricing

Both technologies are free to use, and their source code is publicly available. However, as I mentioned, Xamarin has a commercial version that is not free, which can be inconvenient if scalability is important to you.

Xamarin vs. Flutter: Support and Ecosystem

When choosing between the two frameworks, it's important to consider community support. This includes training resources for newbies, a common place for developers to discuss problems and ideas, and more.

Flutter has one of the strongest communities of any framework and language based on it. Google Docs is very handy for newbies, and there's a wealth of content available on public sites and forums like StackOverflow, where you can find help on demand.

Community support for Xamarin is more limited. While Microsoft does provide some free Xamarin courses and tutorials to help you get started, the level of content is not up to Flutter standards.

Summary

With the growing popularity of cross-mobile application development, many new frameworks and technologies have emerged. One of them is Xamarin, an open-source platform supported by Microsoft. In 2019, I decided to jump on that bandwagon and start my adventure in mobile development with Xamarin.Forms. It wasn't all bad until I was introduced to Flutter. I realized there was no going back.

Flutter is Google's user interface toolkit for creating beautiful, natively compiled mobile, web and desktop applications from a single codebase. It is offered as an open-source technology available to developers and designers for free. It was announced in 2015 at the Dart Developer Summit and originally allowed development of applications for the Android mobile operating system, supporting content rendering at up to 120 frames per second. The first stable version appeared in 2017.

Xamarin is an older technology than Flutter, and it has undergone significant evolution. In its current form, Xamarin was created in 2011 by Mono developers as a solution that would allow cross-platform applications. Development in Xamarin was done in a single language, allowing code to be shared across all supported platforms.

Initially, the user interface (UI) of each platform was not reusable. The solution came in 2014. Xamarin.Forms was born. Xamarin.Forms provided a layer of abstraction over the UI concepts of the various platforms. This allowed developers to reuse much of their code across all platforms. In 2016, it was bought out by Microsoft and integrated into NET platforms.

The two biggest differences between Xamarin and Flutter are the languages used and the way the interface is rendered. In Xamarin, the user interface is implemented using XAML with C# support. In Flutter, both the logic and the entire user interface are handled by a modern, powerful language, Dart. Also an extremely important difference is the way the user interface is rendered. In Flutter, graphics and animations are drawn on the screen in real time using the Skia rendering engine. The Xamarin technology is slower because it has to translate the native control tree.

Flutter and Xamarin are both cross-platform mobile app development frameworks, so how are they different? Read more in the article "Flutter vs Xamarin 2022".

Xamarin vs Flutter

Which framework is better for software development: Xamarin or Flutter