Expo vs. React Native vs. React vs. WatermelonDB Comparison Chart

React Native combines the best parts of native development with React, a best-in-class JavaScript library for building user interfaces. Use a little—or a lot. You can use React Native today in your existing Android and iOS projects or you can create a whole new app from scratch. React primitives render to native platform UI, meaning your app uses the same native platform APIs other apps do. Many platforms, one React. Create platform-specific versions of components so a single codebase can share code across platforms. With React Native, one team can maintain two platforms and share a common technology—React. React Native lets you create truly native apps and doesn't compromise your users' experiences. It provides a core set of platform agnostic native components like View, Text, and Image that map directly to the platform’s native UI building blocks.

​WatermelonDB is a reactive database framework designed to build powerful React and React Native apps that scale from hundreds to tens of thousands of records while remaining fast. It ensures instant app launch regardless of data volume, supports lazy loading to load data only when needed, and offers offline-first capabilities with synchronization to your own backend. It is multiplatform. Optimized for React, it allows easy integration of data into components and is framework-agnostic, enabling the use of its JavaScript API with other UI frameworks. Built on a robust SQLite foundation, WatermelonDB provides static typing with Flow or TypeScript and optional reactivity through an RxJS API. WatermelonDB addresses performance issues in complex applications by loading nothing until requested and performing all querying directly on SQLite on a separate native thread, ensuring most queries resolve instantly.