Overview

Kivy

Stacks91

Followers319

Votes20

Flutter

Stacks17.4K

Followers16.8K

Votes1.2K

GitHub Stars173.7K

Forks29.4K

Flutter vs Kivy: What are the differences?

Introduction

Flutter and Kivy are both frameworks that are used for building cross-platform applications. While they serve a similar purpose, there are key differences between the two.

Language and Development Environment: Flutter uses Dart as its programming language, whereas Kivy uses Python. Dart is a language specifically designed for Flutter and provides a more seamless integration with the framework. On the other hand, Python is a popular and widely-used language with a large community. Flutter requires a specific development environment called Flutter SDK, while Kivy can be used with any Python development environment.
User Interface Components: Flutter provides a rich set of customizable UI components that can be used to build visually appealing and interactive user interfaces. It comes with a wide range of built-in widgets and also allows developers to create their own custom widgets. Kivy, on the other hand, has a more limited set of UI components compared to Flutter. While it does provide basic UI elements, creating custom UI components in Kivy can be more complicated.
Platform Support: Flutter is known for its extensive platform support. It allows developers to build applications for Android, iOS, web, desktop, and even embedded systems. It provides a consistent UI experience across different platforms, making it easier for developers to maintain and update their applications. Kivy, on the other hand, primarily focuses on desktop and mobile platforms. While it does support other platforms like Android and iOS, its support is not as extensive as Flutter.
Performance: Flutter is known for its excellent performance. It uses a technique called "skia" to directly render UI elements on the screen, resulting in smooth animations and fast rendering. Additionally, Flutter applications are compiled into native machine code, which further enhances their performance. Kivy, on the other hand, relies on the underlying Python interpreter for UI rendering, which can sometimes lead to performance issues, especially in complex and resource-intensive applications.
Community and Ecosystem: Flutter has gained a significant amount of popularity and has a large and active community of developers. This means that there are plenty of resources, tutorials, and libraries available to help developers get started and solve any issues they may encounter. Kivy, although it also has a dedicated community, is not as widely adopted as Flutter. As a result, the number of community-contributed resources and libraries for Kivy may be more limited compared to Flutter.
Maturity and Stability: Flutter has been developed and backed by Google, which provides a level of assurance in terms of stability and long-term support. It has been actively developed and improved since its inception. Kivy, on the other hand, is an open-source project that relies on community contributions. While it has been around for many years and has a dedicated development team, its development pace and stability might not be on par with Flutter.

In summary, Flutter and Kivy differ in terms of the programming language used, the availability and customization of UI components, platform support, performance, community support, and maturity/stability. Flutter provides a rich and extensive development environment with excellent performance and a large community, while Kivy offers a more flexible language choice and focuses primarily on desktop and mobile platforms with a smaller community.

Advice on Kivy, Flutter

Nick

CTO at Pickio

Jun 2, 2020

Decided

We built the first version of our app with RN and it turned out a mess in a while. A lot of bugs along with poor performance out of the box for a fairly large app. Many things, that native platform has, cannot be done with existing solutions for RN. For instance, large titles on iOS are not fully implemented in any of existing navigations libraries. Also there's painfully slow JSON bridge and many other small, yet annoying things. On the other hand Flutter became a really powerful and easy-to-use tool. A bit of a learning curve, of course, because of Dart, but it worth learning. Flutter offers TONS of built-in features, no JSON-bridge, AOT compilation for iOS.

490k views490k

Comments

Anonymous

CEO at ME!

Jun 7, 2020

Decided

While with Ionic it is possible to make mobile applications with only web technologies, Flutter is more performant and is easy to use if you are willing to learn Dart, which is a fun language. Plus, it has awesome documentation and, while its ecosystem isn't near as big as JavaScript's is, it has a good package manager called Pub and its packages are generally high quality.

403k views403k

Comments

Thuan

FE Lead at SOLID ENGINEER

Jun 16, 2020

Decided

Javascripts is the most populated language in the world.
Easy to learn & deployed production
Fast development
Strong community
Completed Documents
Native performance with lower RAM used.
Easy to handle native issues by using native code like Java / Objective C
Powered by Facebook.

666k views666k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Kivy	Flutter
It is an open source Python library for rapid development of applications that make use of innovative user interfaces, such as multi-touch apps. It runs on Linux, Windows, OS X, Android, iOS, and Raspberry Pi. You can run the same code on all supported platforms.	Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Cross platform; 100% free to use, under an MIT license ; well documented API	Fast development - Flutter's "hot reload" helps you quickly and easily experiment, build UIs, add features, and fix bug faster. Experience sub-second reload times, without losing state, on emulators, simulators, and hardware for iOS and Android.;Expressive UIs - Delight your users with Flutter's built-in beautiful Material Design and Cupertino (iOS-flavor) widgets, rich motion APIs, smooth natural scrolling, and platform awareness.;Access native features and SDKs - Make your app come to life with platform APIs, 3rd party SDKs, and native code. Flutter lets you reuse your existing Java, Swift, and ObjC code, and access native features and SDKs on iOS and Android.
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 173.7K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 29.4K
Stacks 91	Stacks 17.4K
Followers 319	Followers 16.8K
Votes 20	Votes 1.2K
Pros & Cons
Pros 8 Readable 6 Pythonic 5 Simple 1 Convert to APK file Cons 2 Same function but different name for different widgets	Pros 147 Hot Reload 125 Cross platform 107 Performance 90 Backed by Google 74 Compiled into Native Code Cons 29 Need to learn Dart 11 Lack of community support 10 No 3D Graphics Engine Support 8 Graphics programming 6 Lack of friendly documentation
Integrations
Python Linux Windows Mac OS X	Android SDK Firebase Dart

What are some alternatives to Kivy, Flutter?

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

.NET

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

Ionic

Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript.

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

React Native

React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.

Symfony

It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.