When comparing Ionic Framework vs Xamarin Forms, the Slant community recommends Ionic Framework for most people. In the question“What are the best systems to deliver native Android and iOS apps from one code?” Ionic Framework is ranked 2nd while Xamarin Forms is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Ionic Framework is:
Large quantity of plugins to access native APIs without code nothing in native language.
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Pros
Pro Cordova plugins
Large quantity of plugins to access native APIs without code nothing in native language.
Pro Large, friendly and active community
Ionic Framework is currently one of the most popular frameworks for hybrid mobile app development. This has resulted in a very large community of active users who contribute to the community by writing tutorials and answering questions.
Pro Free and open source
Ionic is free to use and open source, resulting in an active and helpful community of users and contributors.
Pro Many tutorials online to start learning
Pro Supports F#
Xamarin supports F#, giving developers a functional language for building native apps on iOS, Android and Windows.
Pro Free
Microsoft bought Xamarin and made it free.
Pro Cross platform
Cons
Con Can be buggy
Ionic is still a young framework (version 1.0 was released in May 2015). There are still some quirks and bugs in the framework to work out, which you can see a list of on their Github.
However Ionic is under active development and bugs are generally addressed quickly.