"Flutter or React Native?" is one of the first questions on almost every mobile project we start. We build with both — our own finance app, Talika, is Flutter — and the honest answer is that both are excellent. The right choice depends on a few concrete factors.

How they differ under the hood

  • Flutter draws every pixel itself with its own rendering engine, using Dart. The UI looks identical on every device.
  • React Native renders real native components, driven by JavaScript or TypeScript and React.

Choose Flutter when

  • The design is highly custom — brand-heavy UI, rich animation, pixel-perfect consistency across Android and iOS.
  • You want one codebase that also targets desktop or embedded screens.
  • Offline-first apps with local databases and heavy UI work, where predictable rendering helps.
  • Your team is happy learning Dart (most developers pick it up quickly).

Choose React Native when

  • Your team already writes React and TypeScript for the web.
  • You want to share logic, types and even some components with a web app.
  • The app should feel strongly native, following each platform's own components and conventions.
  • You rely on the JavaScript ecosystem and web-style tooling such as Expo.

What matters less than people think

  • Raw performance: both deliver smooth 60 fps apps when built well. Poor architecture slows apps far more than the framework does.
  • Popularity charts: both have large communities, mature tooling and long-term backing.

The questions we ask clients

  1. Who will maintain this app in two years, and what do they already know?
  2. Is there a web product that should share code with the app?
  3. How custom is the design compared with standard platform UI?
  4. Does the app need to work fully offline?
Pick the framework your team can maintain confidently. That decision outlasts any benchmark.

Our default

For brand-led consumer apps and offline-first tools we usually lean Flutter. For products that live alongside a React web app, React Native with TypeScript usually wins. Either way, the architecture, testing and release process matter more than the logo on the framework.