Best Free Development Frameworks

Flutter

Google

Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. Paint your app to life in milliseconds with Stateful Hot Reload. Use a rich set of fully-customizable widgets to build native interfaces in minutes. Quickly ship features with a focus on native end-user experiences. Layered architecture allows for full customization, which results in incredibly fast rendering and expressive and flexible designs. Flutter’s widgets incorporate all critical platform differences such as scrolling, navigation, icons and fonts, and your Flutter code is compiled to native ARM machine code using Dart's native compilers. Flutter's hot reload helps you quickly and easily experiment, build UIs, add features, and fix bugs faster. Experience sub-second reload times without losing state on emulators, simulators, and hardware.

9 Ratings

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Ionic

Drifty

The Ionic Platform allows you to bring your apps to market faster with an integrated app platform built on the leading cross-platform mobile SDK. Build, secure, and deliver new mobile apps—and transform existing ones—across iOS, Android, and Web platforms from a single codebase. Full scalability—Grow from prototype to production to enterprise-scale, without having to think about capacity, reliability, or performance. Better apps, everywhere—Slash your development time and costs with a platform that lets you write once and deploy anywhere—iOS, Android, and Web. The core of the Ionic development experience is Ionic Capacitor, a cross platform native runtime that runs equally well on native iOS and Android mobile devices, as well as any web browser. The big difference is that, unlike traditional native development or cross-platform approaches, the UI of a Capacitor app runs primarily in the browser.

6 Ratings

Starting Price: Free

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React Native

Titanium SDK

Write in JavaScript, and run natively everywhere. Titanium lets you develop cross-platform native mobile applications and build great mobile experiences using JavaScript. Access your application's hundreds of native UI and non-visual components (such as networks and media APIs). Easily include third-party modules in your apps with Titanium's wide selection of community modules and premium support integrations. The Titanium SDK helps you build native cross-platform mobile applications using JavaScript and the Titanium API, which abstracts the native APIs of the mobile platforms. Titanium empowers you to create immersive, full-featured applications, featuring over 80% code reuse across mobile apps. TiDev licenses Titanium under the OSI-approved Apache Public License (Version 2) and is free for personal and commercial use. Create a basic UI, manage event handling and learn about animations, gestures, and orientation modes.

1 Rating

Starting Price: Free

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Flask

Flask is a lightweight WSGI web application framework. It is designed to make getting started quick and easy, with the ability to scale up to complex applications. It began as a simple wrapper around Werkzeug and Jinja and has become one of the most popular Python web application frameworks. Flask offers suggestions, but doesn't enforce any dependencies or project layout. It is up to the developer to choose the tools and libraries they want to use. There are many extensions provided by the community that make adding new functionality easy.

1 Rating

Starting Price: Free

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Onsen UI

Experience streamlined development with zero-time setup, using the technologies you already know and love - Javascript, HTML and CSS. Worried that PhoneGap / Cordova apps are slow? Fear not! All animations in Onsen UI have been tuned and optimized to perform well on a wide range of devices. We take great care to ensure that apps made using Onsen UI feel smooth even on lower end devices. Onsen UI is easy to learn while being a powerful tool to create complex mobile apps. We have lots of learning resources including official documentation, an interactive tutorial and a community forum where your questions get answered. A rich variety of UI components specially designed for mobile apps. Onsen UI provides tabs, side menu, stack navigation and tons of other components such as lists and forms.

1 Rating

Starting Price: Free

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Mithril.js

Mithril.js is a modern client-side JavaScript framework for building Single Page Applications. It's small (< 10kb gzip), fast and provides routing and XHR utilities out of the box. Mithril.js is used by companies like Vimeo and Nike, and open source platforms like Lichess. If you are an experienced developer and want to know how Mithril.js compares to other frameworks, see the framework comparison page. An easy way to try out Mithril.js is to include it from a CDN and follow this tutorial. It'll cover the majority of the API surface (including routing and XHR) but it'll only take 10 minutes. You can now update the label of the button by clicking the button. Since we used m.mount, you don't need to manually call m.render to apply the changes in the count variable to the HTML; Mithril.js does it for you.

1 Rating

Starting Price: Free

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.NET MAUI

Microsoft

.NET Multi-platform App UI (.NET MAUI) is a framework for building modern, multi-platform, natively compiled iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows apps using C# and XAML in a single codebase. .NET MAUI uses the latest, modern technologies for building native apps on Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows abstracting them into one common framework built on .NET 6. Native apps look and feel like the operating system on which they belong by default and layouts are fully adapted to each device automatically with no additional code. Platform APIs are available directly from C# to access over 60 platform features from a single cross-platform API including access to things like isolated storage, sensors, geolocation, camera, and a whole lot more with no compromises.

1 Rating

Starting Price: Free

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Angular

Learn one way to build applications with Angular and reuse your code and abilities to build apps for any deployment target. For web, mobile web, native mobile and native desktop. Achieve the maximum speed possible on the Web Platform today, and take it further, via Web Workers and server-side rendering. Angular puts you in control over scalability. Meet huge data requirements by building data models on RxJS, Immutable.js or another push-model. Build features quickly with simple, declarative templates. Extend the template language with your own components and use a wide array of existing components. Get immediate Angular-specific help and feedback with nearly every IDE and editor. All this comes together so you can focus on building amazing apps rather than trying to make the code work. From prototype through global deployment, Angular delivers the productivity and scalable infrastructure that supports Google's largest applications.

1 Rating

Starting Price: Free

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Syncfusion Essential Studio

Syncfusion

Includes more than 1,600 components and frameworks for Windows Forms, WPF, ASP.NET (Web Forms, MVC, Core), UWP, WinUI, Xamarin, Flutter, JavaScript, Angular, Blazor, Vue and React. Includes top requested components such as charts, grids, schedulers, diagrams, maps, gauges, docking, ribbons, and many more! Working with the industry’s best and brightest minds to streamline your business. Includes more than 1,700 components and frameworks for major platforms. A wide range of product demos and training, including video tutorials, documentation, and KBs. Every control is fine-tuned to work with a high volume of data. Create powerful apps by viewing and editing Excel, PDF, Word, and PowerPoint files. Truly unlimited dedicated support system via the public forum, feature & feedback page, live chat, and support tickets. Easy integration of tools to blend Syncfusion controls with your project.

Starting Price: $495 one-time payment

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jQuery Mobile

OpenJS Foundation

jQuery Mobile is an HTML5-based user interface system designed to make responsive websites and apps that are accessible on all smartphones, tablets, and desktop devices. jQuery Mobile framework takes the "write less, do more" mantra to the next level: Instead of writing unique applications for each mobile device or OS, the jQuery mobile framework allows you to design a single highly-branded responsive website or application that will work on all popular smartphone, tablet, and desktop platforms. We believe that your website or app should feel like your brand, not any particular OS. To make building highly customized themes easy, we've created ThemeRoller for mobile to make it easy to drag and drop colors and download a custom theme. For polished visuals without the bloat, we leverage CSS3 properties. We recommend using our tool to build a custom bundle that contains only the components you need.

Starting Price: Free

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Mobile Angular UI

Mobile Angular UI is a mobile UI framework just like Sencha Touch or jQuery Mobile. If you know Angular JS and Twitter Bootstrap you already know it! Mobile Angular UI provides essential mobile components that are missing in Bootstrap 3, switches, overlays, sidebars, scrollable areas, and absolute positioned top and bottom navbars that don't bounce on scroll. It relies on robust libraries like fastclick.js and overthrow.js to achieve a better mobile experience. No jQuery dependencies, no fat bootstrap js. Just a few angular.js directives are super easy to learn to put things together. Mobile Angular UI retains most of the Bootstrap 3 syntax. This way it’s trivial to bring an existing desktop web app to mobile. Also, a super-small CSS file is provided to do the opposite. Just include it and you’ll get a fully responsive and touch-enabled interface that can be used everywhere. FontAwesome Icons are included by default in place of Glyphicons.

Starting Price: Free

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Svelte Native

Svelte Native is a mobile application framework powered by Svelte, build mobile apps using the friendly web framework you already know. Build cross-platform, native iOS and Android apps without web views. Get truly native UI and performance while sharing skills and code with the web. Use the full power of Svelte including transitions, stores, and reactivity. One of the smoothest development experiences available for mobile. Svelte Native is a new approach to building mobile applications using NativeScript. Where other JavaScript mobile development frameworks like React Native and NativeScript-Vue do the bulk of their work on the mobile device, Svelte Native shifts that work into a compile step that happens when you build your app. Instead of using techniques like virtual DOM diffing, Svelte writes code that surgically updates the native view widgets when the state of your app changes.

Starting Price: Free

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Framework7

Framework7 is a free and open-source framework to develop mobile, desktop, or web apps with a native look and feel. It is also an indispensable prototyping tool to show a working app prototype as soon as possible in case you need to. With such a stunning set of UI components that Framework7 provides right from the box, it allows to create web apps, progressive web apps (PWA), and iOS and Android apps with a native look and feel. Framework7 paired with extra tools like Electron and NW.js allows to build native desktop apps. You can use any tools you love when working with Framework7. It doesn’t force you to use anything except plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Creating apps with Framework7 is easy as creating a website. And in addition to vanilla JavaScript library, Framework7 comes with Vue.js, React, and Svelte components to bring components-syntax, structured data, and data bindings with the power and simplicity of Vue.js, React, or Svelte.

Starting Price: Free

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Koa

Koa is a new web framework designed by the team behind Express, which aims to be a smaller, more expressive, and more robust foundation for web applications and APIs. By leveraging async functions, Koa allows you to ditch callbacks and greatly increase error handling. Koa does not bundle any middleware within its core, and it provides an elegant suite of methods that make writing servers fast and enjoyable. A Koa application is an object containing an array of middleware functions that are composed and executed in a stack-like manner upon request. Koa is similar to many other middleware systems that you may have encountered such as Ruby's Rack, Connect, and so on - however, a key design decision was made to provide high-level "sugar" at the otherwise low-level middleware layer. This improves interoperability, and robustness, and makes writing middleware much more enjoyable.

Starting Price: Free

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UIkit

Create websites on the fly with the drag and drop page builder. It generates perfect UIkit markup, tailored for your needs. Customize every aspect of UIkit visually, build and arrange your content, all in one comprehensive and intuitive interface. Build pages with ready-to-use elements made from UIkit components, like buttons, cards, accordions and much more. Modify the visual appearance of your site – including colors, fonts, margins and other style-related properties – with a sophisticated style customizer for UIkit.

Starting Price: Free

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NativeScript

Improve OSS repository management using multiple monorepo setups. Improved onboarding: tutorials for all flavors, linked from the home page. Improved Dialog handling with core-provided abstract APIs. Core: split out architectural level packages for advanced use-cases and scalability. This page will walk through installing everything you need to build your first NativeScript app. Setting up the Android development environment can be daunting if you are new to Android development, however following the next steps carefully will get you up and running in no time. Setting up the Android development environment can be daunting if you are new to Android development, however following the next steps carefully will get you up and running in no time.

Starting Price: Free

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QUnit

The powerful, easy-to-use JavaScript testing framework. Easy, zero-configuration setup for any Node.js project and minimal configuration for browser-based projects. Tests can be run anywhere; Node, your browser, even inside a web worker. Test your code where it runs. Flexible APIs for custom assertions, runners, and reporters mean you can extend QUnit to fit your needs. Getting started with QUnit for Node.js projects is quick and easy. First, install the QUnit package using npm. You can now run the test suite through the QUnit CLI. It is recommended that you run the QUnit command via an npm script, which will find the QUnit command automatically from your local dependencies. Check out the API documentation to learn more about the QUnit APIs for organizing tests and making assertions.QUnit follows the Node.js Long-term Support (LTS) schedule and provides support for current, active LTS, and maintenance LTS releases.

Starting Price: Free

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Mocha

Mocha runs in the browser. Every release of Mocha will have new builds of ./mocha.js and ./mocha.css for use in the browser. By adding an argument (usually named done) to it() to a test callback, Mocha will know that it should wait for this function to be called to complete the test. This callback accepts both an Error instance (or subclass thereof) or a falsy value; anything else is invalid usage and throws an error (usually causing a failed test). These reporters expect Mocha to know how many tests it plans to run before execution. This information is unavailable in parallel mode, as test files are loaded only when they are about to be run. In serial mode, tests results will “stream” as they occur. In parallel mode, reporter output is buffered; reporting will occur after each file is completed. In practice, the reporter output will appear in “chunks” (but will otherwise be identical). If a test file is particularly slow, there may be a significant pause while it’s running.

Starting Price: Free

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Sails

Build practical, production-ready Node.js apps in a matter of weeks, not months. Sails is the most popular MVC framework for Node.js, designed to emulate the familiar MVC pattern of frameworks like Ruby on Rails, but with support for the requirements of modern apps, data-driven APIs with scalable, service-oriented architecture. Sails makes it easy to build custom, enterprise-grade Node.js apps. Building on top of Sails means your app is written entirely in JavaScript, the language you and your team are already using in the browser. Sails bundles a powerful ORM, Waterline, which provides a simple data access layer that just works, no matter what database you're using. Sails comes with blueprints that help jumpstart your app's backend without writing any code. Since Sails translates incoming socket messages for you, they're automatically compatible with every route in your Sails app. Sails offers commercial support to accelerate development and ensure best practices in your code.

Starting Price: Free

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Avalonia UI

Avalonia UI enables developers to create multi-platform apps with .NET. Write once, and run everywhere. Save time and focus on your product. Considered a spiritual successor to WPF, Avalonia UI provides a familiar developer experience, allowing you to leverage years of pre-existing knowledge and investments. rusted by JetBrains as the best framework for modernizing their WPF-based tools, used by >170,000 companies, including 431 on the Fortune 500 list. Our developer community has grown enormously as Avalonia UI has grown in popularity. Join us and be welcomed into our supportive and vibrant community.

Starting Price: Free

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Corona

Corona Labs

Select from numerous plugins which extend the Corona core for features like in-app advertising, analytics, media, and much more. Develop for mobile, desktop, and connected TV devices with just one code base. Corona speeds up the development process. Update your code, save the changes, and instantly see the results in our instant-update Simulator. When you're ready to test on real devices, build and deploy your app just once and then see code/assets update automatically, all over your local network. It's like magic. From bleeding-fast OpenGL graphics to the lightweight scripting power of Lua, Corona is optimized for performance at every core level. With Corona, your apps are automatically compiled at build time, streamlined for performance and stability. Corona's source code is now open for developers to add features to that they need and even contribute back to the core product.

Starting Price: Free

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Aurelia

Aurelia's standards-based, unobtrusive style makes it the only framework that empowers you to build components using vanilla JavaScript or TypeScript. If you know modern JS and HTML, there's little more to learn to build even the most complex apps. At the core of Aurelia is a high-performance, reactive system, capable of batching DOM updates in a way that leaves other frameworks, and their virtual DOMs, in the dust. Experience consistent, scalable performance, no matter how complex your UI. Aurelia enables powerful reactive binding to any object. By using adaptive techniques Aurelia selects the most efficient way to observe each property in your model and automatically syncs your UI and your state with best-in-class performance. State management, internationalization and validation - all official plugins from the core team. CLI, VS Code plugin, and Chrome debugger - optional tools to enhance development.

Starting Price: Free

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Jetpack Compose

Google

Jetpack Compose is Android’s recommended modern toolkit for building native UI. It simplifies and accelerates UI development on Android. Quickly bring your app to life with less code, powerful tools, and intuitive Kotlin APIs.

Starting Price: Free

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Wisej.NET

Ice Tea Group

Wisej.NET provides a platform and set of tools designed to ease the burden of developing, testing, deploying, and maintaining complex AI-powered business software. It bridges the gap between traditional WinForms-style desktop applications and the web by empowering developers to leverage their existing .NET and C# or VB.NET) skills. Developers are able to use the tools they are familiar with, like a pixel-perfect design surface and drag-and-drop controls with the languages they are comfortable with (C# or VB.NET) to build real-time web applications without having to learn HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. They can stay in their favorite IDE like Visual Studio to take advantage of features like IntelliSense, integrated debugging, design surfaces and source control integration. Front-end developers can leverage their knowledge of web technologies to augment applications and seamlessly integrate third-party packages like HTML5 charting libraries and ASP.NET controls.

Starting Price: $990

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Apache Cordova

Apache Software Foundation

Mobile apps with HTML, CSS & JS. Target multiple platforms with one code base. Free and open source. Reusable code across platforms, support for offline scenarios, access native device APIs. Cordova command-line runs on Node.js and is available on NPM. Follow platform specific guides to install additional platform dependencies. Create a blank Cordova project using the command-line tool. Navigate to the directory where you wish to create your project and type cordova create <path>. After creating a Cordova project, navigate to the project directory. From the project directory, you need to add a platform for which you want to build your app. Cordova wraps your HTML/JavaScript app into a native container which can access the device functions of several platforms. These functions are exposed via a unified JavaScript API, allowing you to easily write one set of code to target nearly every phone or tablet on the market today and publish to their app stores.

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Compare the Top Free Development Frameworks as of April 2025

What are Free Development Frameworks?

Flutter

Ionic

React Native

Titanium SDK

Flask

Onsen UI

Mithril.js

.NET MAUI

Angular

Syncfusion Essential Studio

jQuery Mobile

Mobile Angular UI

Svelte Native

Framework7

Koa

UIkit

NativeScript

QUnit

Mocha

Sails

Avalonia UI

Corona

Aurelia

Jetpack Compose

Wisej.NET

Apache Cordova

Best Free Development Frameworks

Compare the Top Free Development Frameworks as of April 2025

What are Free Development Frameworks?

Flutter

Ionic

React Native

Titanium SDK

Flask

Onsen UI

Mithril.js

.NET MAUI

Angular

Syncfusion Essential Studio

jQuery Mobile

Mobile Angular UI

Svelte Native

Framework7

Koa

UIkit

NativeScript

QUnit

Mocha

Sails

Avalonia UI

Corona

Aurelia

Jetpack Compose

Wisej.NET

Apache Cordova

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