React Native vs Flutter in 2025: The Definitive Comparison

The Question Every Founder Asks

You're about to build a mobile app. You want iOS and Android. You don't want to build two separate codebases. So the question becomes: React Native or Flutter?

We've shipped over 30 cross-platform apps across both frameworks. This isn't a theoretical comparison — it's based on real production experiences, real client constraints, and real tradeoffs we've navigated.

Here's the honest answer: there is no universal winner. But there is a right answer for your specific situation, and we'll help you find it.

A Quick Primer

React Native is Meta's open-source framework for building native mobile apps with JavaScript and React. You write components in JSX, and React Native bridges those to the platform's native UI elements.

Flutter is Google's UI toolkit written in Dart. Unlike React Native, Flutter doesn't use native components — it draws its own pixels using the Skia (now Impeller) rendering engine. This is the most important architectural difference between the two.

Performance: The Rendering Story

Flutter has a fundamental performance advantage in one specific scenario: highly custom, animation-heavy UIs. Because Flutter owns the rendering pipeline entirely, it can achieve consistent 60–120fps without worrying about the JavaScript bridge or native component behavior.

React Native has narrowed the gap significantly with the New Architecture (released in 2024), which replaces the old asynchronous bridge with JSI (JavaScript Interface) — enabling synchronous, direct calls between JavaScript and native code. For most apps, you won't notice a difference.

Our take: For typical business apps — dashboards, e-commerce, social features — both frameworks perform identically well. Flutter's advantage only materializes in complex gaming-adjacent UIs or when you need pixel-perfect consistency across every Android device out there.

Developer Experience

This is where React Native shines, especially if your team already writes React.

# React Native with Expo — up and running in minutes
npx create-expo-app my-app --template
cd my-app && npx expo start

# Flutter — requires Flutter SDK installation, then:
flutter create my_app
cd my_app && flutter run

React Native's DX advantages:

• Your web engineers can contribute to the mobile codebase immediately
• Shared business logic and even UI components with your web app
• Massive JavaScript/npm ecosystem
• Hot reload is fast and reliable with Expo

Flutter's DX advantages:

• Dart is a clean, strongly-typed language that's easy to learn
• Excellent tooling — flutter doctor, widget inspector, DevTools
• No bridge debugging nightmares (a real pain point in older RN versions)
• The entire framework is open source — you can read the widget source

Recommendation: If your team is JavaScript-first, React Native will feel natural from day one. If you're starting fresh with a dedicated mobile team, Flutter's DX is genuinely excellent and Dart has a low learning curve.

Ecosystem & Third-Party Libraries

React Native wins on ecosystem breadth — it's backed by Meta's scale and benefits from the entire npm ecosystem. Most third-party services (Stripe, Firebase, analytics SDKs) ship a React Native library as a first-class citizen.

Flutter's ecosystem has matured rapidly. pub.dev is comprehensive, and Google's own Firebase, Maps, and Pay packages are excellent. The gap has closed significantly since 2022.

Where Flutter still struggles: niche enterprise integrations. If you need to integrate a legacy device SDK, a white-label fintech component, or an obscure analytics provider, React Native is more likely to have a working package.

Code Sharing with Web

This is a major React Native advantage that's often underweighted.

If you're building a SaaS that has both a web app and a mobile app, React Native lets you share:

• Business logic (hooks, state management, API calls)
• Type definitions and validation schemas (Zod, etc.)
• Design tokens and theming
• Even some UI components with React Native Web

// This hook works identically in React Native and React web
export function useSubscription(userId: string) {
  return useQuery({
    queryKey: ['subscription', userId],
    queryFn: () => api.getSubscription(userId),
  });
}

Flutter has no equivalent web story. Yes, Flutter Web exists, but it's not a serious option for production web apps — it renders to a canvas and is incompatible with normal SEO and accessibility expectations.

When to Choose React Native

• Your team writes JavaScript/TypeScript
• You're building alongside a Next.js or React web app
• You need deep integration with third-party services
• You want to ship to web eventually
• Budget constraints mean your mobile and web devs need to be the same people

When to Choose Flutter

• Your team is dedicated mobile with no web overlap
• Your UI is highly custom — complex animations, games, or -brand-driven experiences that need pixel-perfect consistency
• You're targeting older Android devices where RN's bridge has historically shown more variance
• Your app is primarily a consumer product with heavy motion design

Our Verdict

In 2025, React Native with Expo is our default recommendation for most products we build. The New Architecture has closed the performance gap, the ecosystem is unmatched, and the ability to share code with a web codebase is a real business advantage.

Flutter is our recommendation when a client has a dedicated mobile team, a highly custom visual design, or specific requirements that benefit from Flutter's rendering model.

The best framework is the one your team can ship, iterate, and maintain confidently. Get that decision right and the rest follows.