When comparing Onsen UI 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?” Ionic Framework is ranked 5th while Onsen UI is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Ionic Framework is:
Large quantity of plugins to access native APIs without code nothing in native language.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Open source and free
Onsen UI is open source, and completely free to use.
Pro Can be used for web apps as well
Onsen UI is usable for classic web development as well as mobile.
Pro Large selection of components
Onsen UI provides a wide selection of components that are ready to use out of the box and are easily customizable.
Pro Easy to use
Onsen UI provides very clear, well-written and detailed documentation.
It uses popular technologies that are likely already familiar to developers (such as jQuery and Angular).
The framework is semantic and intuitive to use, making it quite fast to learn.
Pro Supports React
React is the most trending front-end UI framework, naturally supporting that is a plus.
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 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.