When comparing Ionic Framework vs NativeScript, the Slant community recommends Ionic Framework for most people. In the question“What are the best frameworks for developing cross-platform mobile apps?” Ionic Framework is ranked 5th while NativeScript is ranked 9th. 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 Svelte Native
Used by Svelte framework for native development.
Pro Leverages knowledge in Angular
Angular is a very popular framework, and teams already developing angular will feel right at home with Nativescript + Angular
Pro Works great with vue.js
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 Nativescript + Angular apps for Android tend to have long startup times.
It's very difficult to have acceptable startup times with NS+Angular in Android. It's not uncommon to see apps taking 6 sec or more to start AFTER having been optimized with Webpack (mandatory!). The same app in iOS takes only 2-3 sec. Also, this seems to happen only with the NS+Angular flavour. People using plain NS (without Angular) don't seem to have the issue.