Meteor vs React Native

Overview

Meteor

Stacks1.9K

Followers1.8K

Votes1.7K

GitHub Stars44.8K

Forks5.3K

React Native

Stacks34.4K

Followers29.5K

Votes1.2K

GitHub Stars124.4K

Forks24.9K

Meteor vs React Native: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will compare Meteor and React Native, two popular frameworks for building web and mobile applications.

Scalability: One key difference between Meteor and React Native is their scalability. Meteor is designed to be a full-stack framework, providing a cohesive solution for both the front-end and back-end of an application. It uses a real-time data synchronization feature called "reactive programming" which allows for efficient real-time updates. On the other hand, React Native focuses solely on the front-end development of mobile applications. It enables developers to build native mobile apps using JavaScript, but it relies on external APIs for server-side functionality. Therefore, Meteor offers a more comprehensive solution when it comes to scalability.
Platform-specificity: Meteor is designed to work on both web and mobile platforms, while React Native is specifically focused on mobile app development. React Native allows developers to write code once and deploy it on both iOS and Android platforms, leveraging platform-specific components for a native look and feel. Meteor, on the other hand, uses a single codebase to build applications for web, iOS, and Android platforms, ensuring consistent functionality across different devices. This platform-specificity is a significant difference between the two frameworks.
Learning Curve: In terms of the learning curve, React Native may have a steeper initial learning curve compared to Meteor. React Native requires developers to have a solid understanding of JavaScript and React concepts. However, once the basics are mastered, developers can leverage their existing React knowledge to build native mobile applications. Meteor, on the other hand, has a relatively shallower learning curve since it imposes fewer requirements on the developer's knowledge base. With its intuitive API and built-in features, Meteor simplifies many aspects of web and mobile app development.
Community and Ecosystem: Both Meteor and React Native have active and supportive communities, but they differ in terms of their focus and ecosystem. React Native, being primarily focused on mobile app development, has a larger community surrounding mobile app development. It benefits from a vast ecosystem of libraries, components, and tools specifically targeted for mobile app development. Meteor, on the other hand, has a strong community focused on web and mobile app development. It offers a rich ecosystem of packages and libraries that cater to different web and mobile application requirements.
Performance: While both Meteor and React Native offer good performance, there are some differences. Meteor's reactivity feature allows for effortless real-time updates, making it an excellent choice for applications that require real-time data synchronization. On the other hand, React Native leverages platform-specific components and native rendering, resulting in better performance compared to hybrid frameworks like Cordova/PhoneGap. React Native also benefits from the performance optimizations provided by JavaScript engines like JavaScriptCore or V8.
Development Speed: Meteor and React Native offer different development speeds based on the project requirements. Meteor's full-stack nature and built-in features facilitate rapid development as it provides all the necessary tools and functionalities out of the box. Developers can quickly prototype and develop web and mobile apps using the same codebase. React Native, although requiring additional setup for server-side APIs, offers faster development for mobile apps. Its hot reloading and modular structure help developers iterate quickly, enhancing productivity during the development process.

In summary, Meteor and React Native differ in terms of scalability, platform-specificity, learning curve, community and ecosystem, performance, and development speed. Meteor is a comprehensive full-stack framework suitable for scalable web and mobile applications, while React Native is focused on providing a native mobile app development experience for both iOS and Android platforms.

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Advice on Meteor, React Native

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.

491k views491k

Comments

Andrea

May 26, 2020

Needs adviceon

Vue.js

Vue Native

React

I'm a huge fan of Vue.js and I'm pretty comfortable with it. I need to build a mobile app for my company and I was now wondering whether I could make use of VueJS with Vue Native instead of switching to React. I know Vue Native builds on top of RN. My question is whether I'd have as much freedom with Vue Native over RN and whether you feel like Vue Native is "production ready" or not. Not sure of which shortcomings I may find using Vue Native... Thanks a lot!!!

336k views336k

Comments

Furqan

Jul 16, 2020

Needs adviceon

React Native

Hello guys, I am new here. So, if I posted without specific guidelines, please ignore.

Basically, I am an iOS developer and developing native apps for the last three years. Recently, I started learning React Native to develop apps for both platforms. If anyone out there knows any useful resources that will become a better react native developer.

@{#newbie}|topic:null|

325k views325k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Meteor	React Native
A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.	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.
Pure JavaScript;Live page updates;Clean, powerful data synchronization;Latency compensation;Hot Code Pushes;Sensitive code runs in a privileged environment;Fully self-contained application bundles; Interoperability;Smart Packages	Native iOS Components;Asynchronous Execution;Touch Handling;Flexbox and Styling; Polyfills
Statistics
GitHub Stars 44.8K	GitHub Stars 124.4K
GitHub Forks 5.3K	GitHub Forks 24.9K
Stacks 1.9K	Stacks 34.4K
Followers 1.8K	Followers 29.5K
Votes 1.7K	Votes 1.2K
Pros & Cons
Pros 251 Real-time 200 Full stack, one language 183 Best app dev platform available today 155 Data synchronization 152 Javascript Cons 5 Does not scale well 4 Hard to debug issues on the server-side 4 Heavily CPU bound	Pros 214 Learn once write everywhere 174 Cross platform 169 Javascript 122 Native ios components 69 Built by facebook Cons 23 Javascript 19 Built by facebook 12 Cant use CSS 4 30 FPS Limit 2 Slow
Integrations
AngularJS React MongoDB Node.js Apache Cordova	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Meteor, React Native?

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.

Flutter

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

Bower

Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.

Xamarin

Xamarin’s Mono-based products enable .NET developers to use their existing code, libraries and tools (including Visual Studio*), as well as skills in .NET and the C# programming language, to create mobile applications for the industry’s most widely-used mobile devices, including Android-based smartphones and tablets, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

NativeScript

NativeScript enables developers to build native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Universal while sharing the application code across the platforms. When building the application UI, developers use our libraries, which abstract the differences between the native platforms.

Elm

Writing HTML apps is super easy with elm-lang/html. Not only does it render extremely fast, it also quietly guides you towards well-architected code.

Apache Cordova

Apache Cordova is a set of device APIs that allow a mobile app developer to access native device function such as the camera or accelerometer from JavaScript. Combined with a UI framework such as jQuery Mobile or Dojo Mobile or Sencha Touch, this allows a smartphone app to be developed with just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Julia

Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library.

Framework7

It is a free and open source mobile HTML framework to develop hybrid mobile apps or web apps with iOS native look and feel. All you need to make it work is a simple HTML layout and attached framework's CSS and JS files.

Qt

Qt, a leading cross-platform application and UI framework. With Qt, you can develop applications once and deploy to leading desktop, embedded & mobile targets.

Related Comparisons

Meteor vs React Native: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will compare Meteor and React Native, two popular frameworks for building web and mobile applications.

Scalability: One key difference between Meteor and React Native is their scalability. Meteor is designed to be a full-stack framework, providing a cohesive solution for both the front-end and back-end of an application. It uses a real-time data synchronization feature called "reactive programming" which allows for efficient real-time updates. On the other hand, React Native focuses solely on the front-end development of mobile applications. It enables developers to build native mobile apps using JavaScript, but it relies on external APIs for server-side functionality. Therefore, Meteor offers a more comprehensive solution when it comes to scalability.
Platform-specificity: Meteor is designed to work on both web and mobile platforms, while React Native is specifically focused on mobile app development. React Native allows developers to write code once and deploy it on both iOS and Android platforms, leveraging platform-specific components for a native look and feel. Meteor, on the other hand, uses a single codebase to build applications for web, iOS, and Android platforms, ensuring consistent functionality across different devices. This platform-specificity is a significant difference between the two frameworks.
Learning Curve: In terms of the learning curve, React Native may have a steeper initial learning curve compared to Meteor. React Native requires developers to have a solid understanding of JavaScript and React concepts. However, once the basics are mastered, developers can leverage their existing React knowledge to build native mobile applications. Meteor, on the other hand, has a relatively shallower learning curve since it imposes fewer requirements on the developer's knowledge base. With its intuitive API and built-in features, Meteor simplifies many aspects of web and mobile app development.
Community and Ecosystem: Both Meteor and React Native have active and supportive communities, but they differ in terms of their focus and ecosystem. React Native, being primarily focused on mobile app development, has a larger community surrounding mobile app development. It benefits from a vast ecosystem of libraries, components, and tools specifically targeted for mobile app development. Meteor, on the other hand, has a strong community focused on web and mobile app development. It offers a rich ecosystem of packages and libraries that cater to different web and mobile application requirements.
Performance: While both Meteor and React Native offer good performance, there are some differences. Meteor's reactivity feature allows for effortless real-time updates, making it an excellent choice for applications that require real-time data synchronization. On the other hand, React Native leverages platform-specific components and native rendering, resulting in better performance compared to hybrid frameworks like Cordova/PhoneGap. React Native also benefits from the performance optimizations provided by JavaScript engines like JavaScriptCore or V8.
Development Speed: Meteor and React Native offer different development speeds based on the project requirements. Meteor's full-stack nature and built-in features facilitate rapid development as it provides all the necessary tools and functionalities out of the box. Developers can quickly prototype and develop web and mobile apps using the same codebase. React Native, although requiring additional setup for server-side APIs, offers faster development for mobile apps. Its hot reloading and modular structure help developers iterate quickly, enhancing productivity during the development process.

Meteor vs React Native

Overview

Meteor vs React Native: What are the differences?