When comparing Ionic 2 vs Ionic Framework, 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 Ionic 2 is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Ionic Framework is:
Large quantity of plugins to access native APIs without code nothing in native language.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Android, iOS and Windows Phone compatible
Pro Deploy as PWA
Pro Native functionality via Cordova plugins
Pro Built on Angular 2
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.
Cons
Con Old version
No point keeping this here, is the old version of ionic.
Con Uses WebView which impacts the app performance
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.