When I was first assigned to use .NET MAUI Blazor after coming off of a project using Flutter, it seemed clunky, industrial, and all-around worse than Flutter. While I still would never choose .NET MAUI Blazor personally, I have gained a greater appreciation for its use cases. In this blog, we’ll take a quick look at .NET MAUI Blazor vs. Flutter platforms and consider when one might be a better pick over another.
A Brief Introduction to Flutter and .NET MAUI Blazor
Flutter and .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) are both cross-platform app development frameworks. In other words, they allow you to write a single codebase for use on multiple platforms, including mobile and desktop. Flutter supports web applications as well.
Flutter is a Google project, while .NET MAUI is supported by Microsoft.
In my opinion, .NET MAUI Blazor is to Flutter what a factory is to an art studio. A factory is easier to staff, and factory workers can usually transfer their skills to other factories easily, while an art studio tends to encourage more whimsy and requires more specialized knowledge.
.NET MAUI vs. .NET MAUI Blazor
To clarify, in this post, we are looking specifically at .NET MAUI Blazor, not .NET MAUI. As the name implies, .NET MAUI Blazor allows you to integrate Blazor components into your MAUI app.
.NET MAUI Blazor vs. Flutter Comparison
Architecture/State Management/Philosophy
MAUI Blazor, like most .NET products, leans heavily on MVC architecture. At this point, MVC is well-known among developers, and .NET has excellent support for it – they have chosen to do one thing and do it well.
In contrast, Flutter doesn’t strictly enforce a particular architectural/state management pattern. Instead, they have a guiding philosophy that “everything is a widget” and leave it up to you to pick from a variety of state management options.
In my opinion, one of the weaknesses of Flutter is that the out-of-the-box state management system is pretty limited. However, the major state management systems in Flutter are well-documented, which leads me to my next point.
Documentation and Community
If we are looking strictly at Flutter and .NET MAUI Blazor, I would say that Flutter has much better docs (and many more community examples as well.)
I would attribute MAUI Blazor’s lackluster documentation to its newness – it has been neither stable enough nor popular enough to need abundant documentation. However, MAUI Blazor’s documentation is easily supplemented because:
- General .NET documentation still applies in MAUI Blazor
- Blazor docs and tutorials are readily transferrable to MAUI Blazor
So, while it’s still nice that Flutter’s documentation is more centrally located, NMB’s resources aren’t all that bad either.
Package Management
Flutter has a rapidly growing package ecosystem, but it is not nearly as stable as the .NET package ecosystem. While the major state management packages are well-supported, it is common for other types of Flutter packages to go stale.
Dependency management is straightforward on both platforms.
Learning Curve
In general, I think both platforms are pretty easy to get started with.
If you have experience with .NET (and especially experience with Blazor), then .NET MAUI Blazor will feel very familiar to you.
However, if you’ve never worked with either, you’ll probably find they are both intuitive once you understand the app’s general structure.
A Note on Languages
.NET MAUI Blazor uses C# for its model/controller code and HTML/CSS for its views/components. Flutter applications, on the other hand, are written in Dart.
While C# and HTML/CSS are both very popular, and your team will probably have experience in all three, I don’t consider Dart a particularly difficult language for anyone with OOP experience, so I wouldn’t consider it a major factor in the learning curve.
Performance
I left this one for the end because I have yet to find any actual performance tests comparing the two platforms, so keep in mind, this is just my subjective experience.
Overall, Flutter feels a little bit more responsive to me. If this is true and not just my perception, I suspect its because Flutter compiles its widgets to native code. In contrast, .NET MAUI Blazor likely uses some form of web view to function (regular .NET MAUI does compile like Flutter, though.)
Additionally, I really enjoy Flutter’s hot reload, which is currently not supported for .NET MAUI Blazor (though, again, is supported for regular .NET MAUI).
My Advice
Ultimately, the best solution depends on your team’s unique background and needs.
My rule of thumb would be that you should download both and give them a try, but if you are (or want to be) a team with strong ties to the broader .NET ecosystem, lean towards .NET MAUI Blazor. If you don’t care for .NET, lean towards Flutter.
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Carlos Vazquez-Chapa
