When comparing Ionic Framework vs Telerik AppBuilder, the Slant community recommends Ionic Framework for most people. In the question“What are the best frameworks for developing cross-platform mobile apps with JavaScript?” Ionic Framework is ranked 1st while Telerik AppBuilder is ranked 18th. 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 Plugins for popular IDEs
Telerik provides Visual Studio and Sublime Text plugins for the AppBuilder.
Pro Integrates with Apache Cordova
AppBuilder offers a fast way to import Cordova plugins such as the camera.
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.
Con Young project with a small community
AppBuilder is a young project that's been fairly slow to gain popularity. This means the community is rather small, so there is a limited amount of 3rd party learning resources available.
There is a forum, but it's not very active.