We've shipped 40+ production mobile apps, roughly evenly split between Flutter and React Native. Most comparison posts you'll read are written by people who've only used one. Here's what actually matters when you're picking a stack for a real product.
Performance: Flutter wins, but barely
Flutter's compiled-to-native rendering is genuinely smoother for animation-heavy UIs. React Native's New Architecture closed most of the gap for typical apps. Unless you're building a game or a Pinterest-class scroll experience, this is no longer a deciding factor.
Hiring: React Native wins, decisively
Your existing React web developers are 80% of the way to shipping React Native. Flutter requires hiring or training Dart developers, and the talent pool is meaningfully smaller in most markets. If team velocity matters more than peak performance, this single fact often decides it.
Ecosystem: a tie with footnotes
Both have mature libraries for the 90% case. React Native's npm ecosystem is larger but inconsistent in quality. Flutter's pub.dev is smaller but more curated. We've shipped on both without hitting walls — but the path to a working SDK feels smoother on Flutter.
Our default in 2025
If the client has React/web engineers in-house, we recommend React Native. If they're greenfield with no team preference and want maximum visual polish, we recommend Flutter. Neither is wrong. The wrong answer is picking based on Twitter discourse.
