MonoDevelop vs Xamarin

Overview

Xamarin

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.5K

Votes785

MonoDevelop

Stacks14

Followers40

Votes0

MonoDevelop vs Xamarin: What are the differences?

1. **Purpose and Focus**: MonoDevelop is primarily an open-source integrated development environment (IDE) focused on supporting multiple programming languages, while Xamarin is a platform specifically designed for developing mobile applications across various platforms like iOS and Android. 2. **Ecosystem Integration**: Xamarin provides seamless integration with Microsoft's Visual Studio, allowing developers to leverage a wide range of tools and resources within the Microsoft ecosystem, whereas MonoDevelop lacks such deep integration. 3. **Mobile Development Support**: Xamarin offers extensive support for mobile development, with tools and frameworks dedicated to building high-performance mobile apps, while MonoDevelop may not have the same level of specialized features tailored for mobile development. 4. **Community and Support**: Xamarin, being a part of Microsoft, benefits from a larger community and more robust support system compared to MonoDevelop, which may have a smaller user base and limited support channels. 5. **Code Sharing and Compatibility**: Xamarin comes with tools like Xamarin.Forms that enable code sharing between different platforms, promoting code reusability, whereas MonoDevelop may not have the same level of cross-platform compatibility features. 6. **Deployment and Distribution**: Xamarin provides comprehensive support for deploying and distributing mobile applications, including convenient tools for app store submissions, testing, and monitoring, while MonoDevelop may offer fewer features in this regard.

In Summary, the key differences between MonoDevelop and Xamarin lie in their primary focus on different types of development, ecosystem integration, mobile application support, community backing, code sharing capabilities, and deployment features.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

Xamarin	MonoDevelop
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.	It enables developers to quickly write desktop and web applications on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. It also makes it easy for developers to port .NET applications created with Visual Studio to Linux and macOS maintaining a single code base for all platforms.
Cross-platform development- Thinking about supporting iOS, Android, Mac and Windows? Xamarin allows you to write it all in C#.;Reuse existing code- Use your favorite .NET libraries in Xamarin apps. Easily use third-party native libraries and frameworks.; Discover as you type- Explore APIs as you type with code autocompletion.;Visual Studio or Xamarin Studio- Create, build, debug, and deploy apps in Visual Studio. Or use Xamarin Studio, a fully-featured IDE that is built for mobile app development.;Native UI, Native Performance- Xamarin delivers high performance compiled code with full access to all the native APIs so you can create native apps with device-specific experiences.; Point and Click UI Design- Xamarin provides a world class Android UI designer. Use Apple Xcode UI designer to create interfaces and Storyboards that automatically sync with your Xamarin.iOS project.	Multi-platform;Advanced Text Editing;Configurable workbench;Multiple language support;Integrated Debugger;GTK# Visual Designer
Statistics
Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 14
Followers 1.5K	Followers 40
Votes 785	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 121 Power of c# on mobile devices 81 Native performance 79 Native apps with native ui controls 73 No javascript - truely compiled code 67 Sharing more than 90% of code over all platforms Cons 9 Build times 5 Visual Studio 4 Price 3 Complexity 3 Scalability	No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available	F# C# MySQL .NET Oracle Linux macOS Microsoft SQL Server Windows SQLite

What are some alternatives to Xamarin, MonoDevelop?

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.

PhpStorm

PhpStorm is a PHP IDE which keeps up with latest PHP & web languages trends, integrates a variety of modern tools, and brings even more extensibility with support for major PHP frameworks.

IntelliJ IDEA

Out of the box, IntelliJ IDEA provides a comprehensive feature set including tools and integrations with the most important modern technologies and frameworks for enterprise and web development with Java, Scala, Groovy and other languages.

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.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a suite of component-based software development tools and other technologies for building powerful, high-performance applications.

WebStorm

WebStorm is a lightweight and intelligent IDE for front-end development and server-side JavaScript.

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.

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE is FREE, open source, and has a worldwide community of users and developers.

PyCharm

PyCharm’s smart code editor provides first-class support for Python, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, CSS, popular template languages and more. Take advantage of language-aware code completion, error detection, and on-the-fly code fixes!