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What are the best tools for making a cross-platform application?

19

Options
Considered

300

User
Recs.

Sep 12, 2020

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

The Best 1 of 19 OptionsWhy?

Best tools for making a cross-platform application	Price	Platforms	Visual GUI Builder
91 B4X	Free / paid	Android, iOS, Windows, MacOs, Linux, Web, Raspberry Pi, Arduino	Yes, even on real devices
72 Web-based application	-	-	-
-- Lazarus	Free	Windows, Linux, Mac, Android	Yes
-- Quasar Framework	Free	Windows, Linux, Mac, Web	-
-- Flutter	-	-	-

B4X

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Top Pro

A very active forum where you can find any issue you have, and quick answers to new ones

Top Con

Java Dependent Desktop Development

Alwaysbusy's Experience

Great support, swift updates, excellent fast growing community See More

Specs

Platforms:Android, iOS, Windows, MacOs, Linux, Web, Raspberry Pi, Arduino

Visual GUI Builder:Yes, even on real devices

Top Pro

A highly motivated program author who is very active in the forums

Erel Uziel is simply the most pro-active Soft-Creator/Forum Manager you will ever come across. If it has not yet been asked & answered, just ask and you will be answered withing minutes, and thanks to it being a trully international forum, this is achieved 24h/7d. See More

TactfulHomados's Experience

Excellent See More

Top Pro

Very easy to use and powerful for IoT

Support for Bluetooth/BLE, MQTT, TCP/UDP, Serial, NFC, Websockets, HTTP/2 across platforms makes it the ideal tool for IoT projects. See More

FantasticZagreus's Experience

I tested several options, and with B4X, was the plattform I got some results in less time, so I decided to use it See More

Top Pro

Create easy, fast and with less code cross-platform views

B4XUI custom views are designed, by Erel and other forum members, exactly with this in mind; custom views that act and feel exactly the same no matter what platform you target. See More

CulturedHuttellurra's Experience

Very simple and good See More

Top Pro

Live code swapping

A huge productivity boost when you can run your apps on the devices and make code changes real time without needing to recompile. See More

Paulo Gomes's Experience

Been using B4X product for over 10 years. Its the very best RAD suite available, being you a noob or an expert, Code is as simple and logic as it can get, and you will never find better support anywhere else! See More

Top Pro

Powerful general purpose programming tool

As mentioned in its website, "With B4X, anyone who wants to, can develop real-world solutions." See More

Steve De George's Experience

Very active forum. No question goes unanswered, See More

Top Pro

No complexities compared with other tools

No need to learn JAVA, C+, PHP, or any other complementary languages in order to achieve exactly what you need. See More

VigilantAernus's Experience

It is a tool set that makes your life much easier, besides being very powerful and complete, it has great support. Thanks B4X! See More

Top Pro

Many informative video tutorials

The tutorials help beginners as well as more experienced programmers grasping important concepts. See More

StrongBaoshengDadi's Experience

I enjoy using B4X. Never found it easier to create multiplatform apps. See More

Top Pro

The best tool with the best service by Erel

ShrewdKuninotokotachi's Experience

Continuously improving to fit my present and future needs See More

ResourcefulJacawitz's Experience

Super easy to build apps. See More

SophisticatedGwynApNudd's Experience

Very powerful suite to make mobile apps, desktop apps, server side apps and web apps. I love and big thanks for this suite, I get better job for make some apps with it! See More

proftic1617 ejaf's Experience

-A great set of tools to use and abuse ... in several areas. -a great forum with lots of people moved by the same reason: b4X -A super responsible for the development ... See More

Aeric Poon's Experience

I found B4X very intuitive for beginners and experts to produce high quality apps in a very short of time. Developers can focus on their project. It is really easy to get started and build any project with B4X. See More

InquisitiveIkaRoa's Experience

It is a lot easier to use than traditional tools See More

Giorgio MyA's Experience

Smooth transition to mobile application development, without the complexities of other tools and with a lightweight environment. See More

DecisiveProvidentia's Experience

Gran Comunidad, facil y rapida la implementación de soluciones empresariales. See More

徐力航's Experience

More than 8 years. With B4X, developing apps is never that easy. See More

ImpartialRyujin's Experience

Excellent... See More

MerryJuksakka's Experience

Powerful , reliable See More

ImpartialBorlung's Experience

I'm using this Toolset to develop powerful Applications for Android, Windows and Arduino since a few years and never had to stop because of limitations. All I needed to do in the past was possible in a incredible short time. See More

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18 Other Options Considered

Flutter

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Top Pro

Instantly preview change made to the code (Hot reload)

Developers can see all the changes they’ve made to the code right away in the app. This helps in bug fixing and helps designers improve how the app looks and check effects immediately. See More

Top Con

Does not support 32-bit iOS devices

If you plan on targeting iPhone 5, 5C or earlier, you can forget about Flutter. See More

Specs

Mobile targets:Android and iOS

Dev platforms:Windows, Mac and Linux

Top Pro

Cross-platform development for iOS and Android (with Web and MacOS support for Flutter in tech preview)

Fluttter apps work across both iOS and Android See More

Top Con

Only supported by mobile and web

Flutter currently is not supported by Windows, Linux or macOS See More

Top Pro

Supported by Google

Google is committed to developing flutter and plans to extend it to more platforms with support for web in preview and work is ongoing to extend Flutter to support desktop as a target environment, allowing developers to create macOS, Windows, and Linux applications with Flutter. See More

Top Con

Limited libraries

Flutter relatively new so the number of libraries are relatively few as compared to other cross-platform services See More

Xojo

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Top Pro

Easy to use

Easy to make compiled native apps. See More

Top Con

Too many bugs

A lot of bugs reported by developers aren’t and won’t be solved. See More

Roman Varas's Experience

Very easy to learn, quite powerful once you learnt it See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Pi, Web,iOS

Visual GUI Builder:Yes

Top Pro

Compiled apps are a major pro. The community is very helpful.

Top Con

No Android support

They plan to eventually support Android, but for now, they only support iOS. See More

Oliver Osswald's Experience

I used MS Visual Studio to create Windows desktop apps (C#, Dot.Net 2.0) and now I am mainly using Xojo to create native desktop apps on macOS, Windows and Ubuntu Linux. I also use Xojo to create standalone webservices running on Ubuntu servers, without need for apache or nginx. See More

Top Pro

Standalone dev tool, you don't need a cloud to use it

Top Con

Targets not always 100% percent compliant with platform standards

What this means is that to get a perfect match for MacOS or Windows or Linux you will have to get into Declares or use 3rd party plugins to get them looking identical to what you'd get with the default platform IDE's (i.e. xCode for MacOS, Visual Studio for Windows). Xojo does the lowest common denominator for controls so it's a bit more work to make each target look perfect (or as perfect as possible). See More

Gavin's Experience

I've used Xojo for over 20 years. In fact, I've built my career on it. I know a number of other languages, including Swift, but I always come back to Xojo to make professional, powerful native apps, quickly. When you learn the IDE and language, you can transfer much of these skills from one target to the next. For example, you can make Windows and Mac apps and then reuse much of these skills to make Web or iOS apps. It's really easy to get started and the product will grow with you. I can honestly recommend it! See More

Top Pro

Very easy to learn, cross-platform compilation often requires just a click

More advanced features are doable with declared, great third-party plugins (Monkeybread & Einhugur are highly recommended), not a subscription. On the downside bugs can linger for years, some features not as complete or powerful as they should be, some expected features (eg calendar control) not there as community or third party provide solutions (so no need to implement and no wish to compete). See More

Top Con

Small company so can be down or bought at any time

kcully's Experience

Easy to get started. Powerful enough that you never reach the technology wall. Great community. Great company to work with BTW. See More

Top Pro

Nice to have back end code that can be shared for Web apps as well as Desktop apps

Top Con

Subscription-based/Not free

Using this product you're betting the company will still be around. If they get bought out by an enterprise that wants to use the tech internally, all they need to do is stop offering subscriptions and suddenly you're scrambling to rebuild your entire app on other technology. See More

LogicalToci's Experience

I get to make excellent looking professional applications with ease. Being a native app on each platform makes the app look feel correctly for the end user. See More

Top Pro

If you have bought a license you can use it for the rest of your life

You bough a LICENSE. See More

Top Con

Limited resources for learning available

There are far too few learning resources available. Overpriced options don't contain up-to-date information. See More

SmartPrabhasa's Experience

easy to use, but powerful in the longer run. real multi platform app generated. dev team is too small IMHO so evolution is quite slow, but there is still so much to be improved. love it. See More

Top Pro

Nice to have back end code that can be shared for Web, Desktop & iOS apps

Looking forward to Android being added to the list. See More

Bob Keeney's Experience

I've been using Xojo for over 16 years. Xojo does a great job making consistent cross-platform (Mac, Windows, Linux, Raspberry Pi) desktop applications and for the most part it's really is a just a checkbox to create native apps for each target. You can also create Mac, Windows, Linux, Raspberry Pi console apps. You can also easily create web apps (not sites!) that work on Mac, Windows, Linux, and Raspberry Pi using much of same code base as desktop/console. Xojo also does iOS applications too. It's by far the youngest target in the product and currently requires using a different framework. The company is slowly migrating the framework to match the other targets. They are currently working on Android but no release date has been set. Having both iOS and Android will make the mobile offering much more complete. See More

Top Pro

Easy to get in touch with the developers

SkillfulPeckols's Experience

Very powerful and an extremely helpful community See More

Top Pro

Free to try, you pay only when you compile for a platform

You pay for one year of updates, then your license still works but you don't get more updates. See More

ComposedAnubis's Experience

Intuitive UI and language, compiles solid modern apps, devoted staff, welcoming community See More

Top Pro

Very helpful books about different themes

UnderstandingNjordr's Experience

Extremely easy to learn and powerful once you learn it. See More

Top Pro

It's been alive since 1998

Xojo has been going since 1998, through different OSs, different architectures and different trends. Many other languages and IDEs have come and gone in that time. See More

DynamicSakpata's Experience

I had been using VB6 and needed to build a Mac version of my app. Converting to Xojo was pretty painless, and I'm also using it to build apps for my web site. Next up are apps for iOS. Their pricing is reasonable (I'm leery of free), and their annual developer conference is terrific. See More

George Balla's Experience

IOS support is terrible, just use Swift. No Android support at all. Very slow and buggy See More

MonoDevelop

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Top Pro

Free

Top Con

Bad formatting

MonoDevelop doesn't offer much in terms of autocompletion and code formatting. Most of the time the automatic formatting that MonoDevelop does is annoying and not really compliant with C# guidelines. See More

RickZeeland's Experience

Interesting option for C#, F#, VB .NET and ASP.NET developers to create desktop and web applications on Linux, Windows and macOS. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows Linux Mac

Visual GUI Builder:Yes

Top Pro

Database Addin

Addin supports MySql, Npgsql (PostgreSQL), Sqlite, Sql Server. See More

Top Con

No binaries for Windows

The IDE is only available as source code for Windows, although an older version seems to be available on Chocolatey. For Linux and Mac there are binaries available. See More

Top Pro

Multiple platform support

Top Pro

Multiple language support

Qt Project

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Top Con

Expensive

Expensive for commercial use, starting at $459/month. See More

Top Pro

Cross platform

Works on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOs, etc. See More

George Balla's Experience

awesome to work with See More

Top Con

It feels unfinished

Shouldn't have a paid license; QML has very strong foundations, very easy to extend and customize but the default controls (especially for desktop) look awful. Digia didn't have the strength to finish it: the default Tabs control has a really unintuitive API and looks very raw (the tabs don't even have the close (x) buttons. Missing controls for treeview or gridview...So much wasted potential, it's a shame... See More

Top Pro

best programming toolkit ever: the power of C++ with the elegance of Java; plus QML

Top Con

Licensing issue

Needs license for commercial use. See More

GitHub Electron

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Top Pro

Relatively low barrier to entry

No need to learn native UI APIs for multiple platforms. See More

Top Con

Extra effort may be required to make things look native on each platform

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

Top Pro

Has a built in packager which allows you to package web apps

the electron packager tool allows you to package your web app for any target platform that you desire, as long as you provide the correct information. See More

Top Con

Looks and feels like an alien

Top Con

Mobile platforms not supported

According to documentation only Windows, Linux and Mac are supported, no mobile platforms. See More

Top Con

Heavyweight

Requires a bit of system memory, and makes applications bulky due to the fact that all your web apps made in electron work in a NodeJS Shell that is basically a web browser displaying your app. See More

Xamarin

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Top Pro

Lets you build on existing .NET knowledge

If you have a background in Windows development, chances are you already know WPF and .NET. Xamarin and Xamarin Forms extends this to other major platforms. And you can reuse existing .NET libraries and packages. See More

Top Con

Build time tends to be longer than Android Studio

Specs

Mobile targets:Android, iOS, Windows Phone

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Apps built with Xamarin can run natively on Android, iOS and Windows Mobile. Xamarin compiles the same C# or F# codebase to native code that runs on several platforms. See More

Top Con

Slow to implement new features; must wait 1+ month to be able to access it

Top Pro

Visual Studio IDE

If Windows is your primary working system, you can write and debug your code on all platforms and devices in Visual Studio, one of the most powerful and productive IDEs available today. A very capable free edition (Community Edition) is available. See More

Top Con

UI editing and creation is unstable

Kotlin

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Top Pro

Easy to learn if you have prior programming experience

Kotlin's syntax is extremely easy to understand. The language can be picked up in a few hours just by reading the language reference. See More

Hosch Nok's Experience

Kotlin is a real multi purpose language, since you can even compile to js or web assembly. It is mainly used for ios and android applications. The developers are the creators of intellij IDE, which is probably the only IDE, which can afford to offer yearly subscriptions. However, the community edition is free and Android projects will be created with Kotlin by default. So you have the best IDE coupled with a deeply integraded programming language, which compiles down to native code. See More

Specs

Price:Free, Open Source

Site:http://kotlinlang.org

Current stable version:1.3

Top Pro

Officially supported for Android development

Starting with version 3.0 of Android Studio, Kotlin support will be built-in. This means that it's now easier than ever to use Kotlin for existing Android projects or even start writing Android apps only with Kotlin from scratch. This also means that Kotlin and Kotlin plugins for Android Studio will be fully supported in the future and their likelihood of being abandoned is quite small since Google is fully embracing the language for their Android ecosystem (alongside Java and C++). See More

Top Pro

Great tooling support

Since Kotlin is made by Jetbrains (the developers of IntelliJ IDEA) so it stands to reason that the IntelliJ support for Kotlin is also great. Besides that, Kotlin also works well with existing Java tools such as Eclipse, Maven, Gradle, Android Studio, etc... See More

Delphi

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Top Pro

Single code base to create Windows, iOS, Mac OS and Android app

ArtisticPallas's Experience

Great!!! See More

Specs

Price:Community Edition: Free Professional: $1,495.00 Enterprise: $3,514.00 Architect: $5,623.00

Current Version:Sydney 10.4

Top Pro

Strongly typed

JoeC.'s Experience

There is now a free community edition if you are developing free open source projects. Same as the paid "Pro" version. See More

Top Pro

Runtime speed

George Balla's Experience

Best programming language, supports Windows 32/64 Linux, IOS/Android See More

Top Pro

Able to deliver SEX (single executable applications)

Top Pro

Compilation speed

Java application

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Top Pro

Works locally without an internet connection

Provided the machine already has Java. See More

Top Con

Not really cross-platform

Applications are compiled to a single platform—the Java Virtual Machine. But the same can be said about .net, Delphi, Javascript or Python set of libraries. See More

BraveMastoratia's Experience

Java is a great tool to build server side or local apps. I use it regularly for nearly 20 years now. See More

Top Pro

Mature

Top Con

Client still needs Java

For Java applications to run on a device, the device needs to have a Java Virtual Machine installed. This can be mitigated by providing java runtime with the app or transpiling to another language (GWT with javascript for instance) See More

Top Pro

Lots of available languages: Kotlin, Scala, Clojure

Top Con

Reputation for being bloated and insecure

Java apps have a poor security reputation and are often slow. But security problems exist in other platforms. Javascript and Python are slower than Java but are popular so speed is not always the only important thing. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Java platform is fully open source (important vs Delphi or historically with .net) See More

Top Pro

Several GUI toolkits available

Swing, SWT, Qt See More

Top Pro

Mixability with other technologies

Can be mixed with other technologies such as HTML and Javascript (Server Side or client side with HTML embedded in JavaFX). Compatible with HTML app approach. See More

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