Ionic vs Play

Overview

Ionic

Stacks9.5K

Followers8.6K

Votes1.8K

Play

Stacks752

Followers609

Votes496

GitHub Stars12.6K

Forks4.1K

Ionic vs Play: What are the differences?

Ionic: A beautiful front-end framework for developing cross-platform apps with web technologies like Angular and React. 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; Play: The High Velocity Web Framework For Java and Scala. Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications.

Ionic and Play are primarily classified as "Cross-Platform Mobile Development" and "Frameworks (Full Stack)" tools respectively.

"Allows for rapid prototyping", "Hybrid mobile" and "It's angularjs" are the key factors why developers consider Ionic; whereas "Scala", "Web-friendly architecture" and "Built on akka" are the primary reasons why Play is favored.

Ionic and Play are both open source tools. It seems that Ionic with 38.4K GitHub stars and 13.1K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Play with 11.2K GitHub stars and 3.75K GitHub forks.

Techstars, eTobb, and Sellsuki are some of the popular companies that use Ionic, whereas Play is used by Coursera, Keen, and Drillist.com. Ionic has a broader approval, being mentioned in 392 company stacks & 350 developers stacks; compared to Play, which is listed in 111 company stacks and 46 developer stacks.

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Advice on Ionic, Play

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

Melly

Dec 19, 2019

Needs advice

Hi, we are an early startup (with an iPOC prototype) but need to get started on our MVP, and our tech developers in India recommended a hybrid, and they use Ionic, then we spoke with a software company in the US and he recommended Flutter or React Native. Any advice or input for us on the differences between these? Our app will need Bluetooth GPS for "near me" and social media sharing reviews capability, and also link on the backend with businesses. Thanks in advance for any help you can give!

540k views540k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Ionic	Play
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.	Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications.
Performance obsessed;Utilizes Angular and React;Native focused;Beautifully designed;Based on Web Components;	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 12.6K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 4.1K
Stacks 9.5K	Stacks 752
Followers 8.6K	Followers 609
Votes 1.8K	Votes 496
Pros & Cons
Pros 248 Allows for rapid prototyping 228 Hybrid mobile 208 It's angularjs 186 Free 179 It's javascript, html, and css Cons 20 Not suitable for high performance or UI intensive apps 15 Not meant for game development 2 Not a native app	Pros 81 Scala 55 Web-friendly architecture 55 Built on akka 50 Stateless 47 High-scalable Cons 3 Evolves fast, keep up with releases 1 Unnecessarily complicated

What are some alternatives to Ionic, Play?

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.

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.

Flutter

Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.

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.

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Ionic vs Play