StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Frameworks
  5. Play vs React Native

Play vs React Native

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Play
Play
Stacks752
Followers609
Votes496
GitHub Stars12.6K
Forks4.1K
React Native
React Native
Stacks34.4K
Followers29.5K
Votes1.2K
GitHub Stars124.4K
Forks24.9K

Play vs React Native: What are the differences?

## Introduction
When it comes to developing mobile applications, developers often have to choose between using Play and React Native. Both frameworks have their own strengths and weaknesses, making it important to understand the key differences between them. 

1. **Performance**: Play is a Java-based framework that runs on the JVM, providing better performance compared to React Native, which uses JavaScript. This difference in performance can impact the speed and responsiveness of the mobile application, with Play generally being faster due to its closer integration with the native platform.

2. **Native UI Components**: Play allows developers to use native UI components easily, providing a seamless integration with the device's operating system and ensuring a consistent user experience. On the other hand, React Native uses JavaScript to render UI components, which can sometimes lead to differences in appearance and behavior across different platforms.

3. **Development Environment**: Play is typically used with Android Studio, providing a comprehensive development environment with a wide range of tools and features for Android app development. React Native, on the other hand, allows developers to use their preferred code editors and tools, making it more flexible but potentially requiring additional setup.

4. **Code Reusability**: React Native is known for its code reusability, allowing developers to write code once and deploy it to multiple platforms, including iOS and Android. Play, on the other hand, is more focused on native development, making it easier to create platform-specific features but potentially requiring more code for cross-platform development.

5. **Community Support**: React Native has a larger and more active community compared to Play, providing developers with access to a wide range of resources, libraries, and plugins. This strong community support can be beneficial for troubleshooting issues, finding solutions, and staying up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in mobile app development.

6. **Learning Curve**: Play is a more traditional framework that may require a steeper learning curve for developers who are new to Java or Android development. React Native, with its JavaScript-based approach, can be easier to learn and more accessible to web developers looking to transition to mobile app development.

In Summary, Play offers better performance and access to native UI components, while React Native excels in code reusability, community support, and a lower learning curve for developers.

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)
or
Manual

Advice on Play, React Native

Nick
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
Andrea

May 26, 2020

Needs adviceonVue.jsVue.jsVue NativeVue NativeReactReact

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
Furqan

Jul 16, 2020

Needs adviceonReact NativeReact 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

Play
Play
React Native
React Native

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.

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.

-
Native iOS Components;Asynchronous Execution;Touch Handling;Flexbox and Styling; Polyfills
Statistics
GitHub Stars
12.6K
GitHub Stars
124.4K
GitHub Forks
4.1K
GitHub Forks
24.9K
Stacks
752
Stacks
34.4K
Followers
609
Followers
29.5K
Votes
496
Votes
1.2K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 81
    Scala
  • 55
    Built on akka
  • 55
    Web-friendly architecture
  • 50
    Stateless
  • 47
    High-scalable
Cons
  • 3
    Evolves fast, keep up with releases
  • 1
    Unnecessarily complicated
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

What are some alternatives to Play, React Native?

Node.js

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

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

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

Laravel

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

.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

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

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

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

Symfony

Symfony

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

Spring

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.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase