GeneXus vs Xamarin Platform comparison

GeneXus and Microsoft are both solutions in the Mobile Development Platforms category. GeneXus is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.5, while Microsoft is ranked #5 with an average rating of 7.4. GeneXus holds a 3.4% mindshare in MDP, compared to Microsoft’s 6.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of GeneXus users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

GeneXus

Read 14 GeneXus reviews

456 Views
217 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Xamarin Platform

Read 40 Xamarin Platform reviews

861 Views
583 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

GeneXus

Xamarin Platform

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Xamarin Platform and GeneXus are two leading products in the mobile development category. Xamarin holds an advantage due to its open-source nature and strong community support, while GeneXus excels in automation capabilities, offering an enhanced speed of development.

Features: Xamarin Platform facilitates cross-platform development with shared codebases and seamless Visual Studio integration, perfect for C# developers. Its support for Xamarin.Forms and plugins like MvvmCross enhance development flexibility. GeneXus simplifies with automatic code generation for multiple platforms, including web and mobile. Its integration capabilities, procedural generation of applications, and multi-language support make it efficient for rapid development cycles.

Room for Improvement: Xamarin could benefit from better integration with third-party libraries, especially in .NET MAUI and support for more complex functionalities like PDF handling without dependencies on external libraries. It could also improve its debugging in complex environments. GeneXus could enhance its front-end customization options, streamline its learning curve for new users, and offer more straightforward integration processes with external services.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Xamarin's deployment is well-integrated within its robust ecosystem, providing comprehensive documentation and community-driven support. In contrast, GeneXus simplifies deployment through automatic updates and integrated tools, alongside offering more personalized customer service, advantageous for enterprises needing targeted assistance.

Pricing and ROI: Xamarin Platform's cost-effectiveness lies in its open-source base, potentially lowering maintenance costs driven by community enhancements. GeneXus, despite a higher initial setup cost, promises faster ROI owing to its automation features that significantly reduce time-to-market and ongoing maintenance needs, making it a strategic option for efficiency-focused long-term projects.

To learn more, read our detailed GeneXus vs. Xamarin Platform Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

GeneXus vs. Xamarin Platform

April 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

GeneXus

Ranking in Mobile Development Platforms

10th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Low-Code Development Platforms (21st)

Xamarin Platform

Ranking in Mobile Development Platforms

5th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Mobile Development Platforms category, the mindshare of GeneXus is 3.4%, up from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Xamarin Platform is 6.7%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Mobile Development Platforms

Featured Reviews

XavierEspinoza

Internal System Coordinator at Red CEDIA

Offers a simplified architecture with outstanding integration capabilities

The integration capabilities of GeneXus are highly valuable for our organization. The metadata obtained within the logic of different systems is also vital. Due to the solution, our company team doesn't have to work with multiple languages and integrations can be made with C Sharp. JavaScript can also be used with GeneXus, the tool takes charge of all the rest and has a simple architecture. The solution can be used out of the box without facing any issues and nothing much needs to be done with frameworks. In our case we need to use Python with GeneXus, we use Ironpython to embed python code in C# .

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Nishan Timilsina

Mobile Engeneer at ServiceLInk inc

Lots or features with good UI and is fairly easy to set up

The product has a lot of features. The common UI is great. You can just write one XM channel core and it'll be used for both iOS and Android. That is a strong feature. It's just natively compiled on the device like other platforms. It can work across platform technology and is natively compiled to build onto both platforms. You can access the native features through the custom vendor, which we call Dependency Services. Dependency Service is another vital feature to access the native functionality of the different platforms, including iOS and Android. It's not too difficult to set up.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The integration capabilities of GeneXus are highly valuable for our organization"

"The solution provides ease of programming and the speed of delivery of demands."

"GeneXus evolves with technology."

"The most valuable feature is that GeneXus works with several languages. It's possible to develop chatbots and other functionalities."

"It is fast in creating systems and connects to the database quickly."

"The integration module is the most valuable feature of this solution for our business, as it allows our clients to create new systems based on their outdated databases, across all API's."

"The front-end features are the most valuable."

"I like the testing models, which allow me to create unit or interface tests of my programs. It helps us avoid missed deadlines because we can detect all the errors before deploying the new versions of the solution. And I also like the integration with coding managers like DevOps or Jenkins. It enables us to do versioning."

More GeneXus pros

"It significantly reduces development and test costs, and ensures that there is synergy between the platforms on product features and user experience."

"Recently, Xamarin has added a lot of features such as Effects, Behaviors, Triggers, etc. This has made the UI user-friendly, lively, and attractive."

"The most valuable features of the Xamarin Platform are that it has cross-platform development, one code base serves a purpose on both, and the grid layout is a lifesaver."

"I like Renderers in Xamarin. They allow us to use native-platform controls easily."

"It has significantly reduced the skill barrier for development and testers."

"Xamarin is well-integrated with Visual Studio so it will feel very familiar to you once you start."

"The ability to share a platform-agnostic common core, or business logic, enables a mobile developer to write code for all targeted mobile platforms, independent of the individual developer's specialization in iOS, Android, or Windows. This helps not only during development but also enables easier maintenance of deployed apps, since bug fixes or feature additions can be often made in the platform-agnostic layer."

"We very much like the XAML design techniques, multiple layout and pages, MVVMCross support, and portability across different platforms."

More Xamarin Platform pros

Cons

"Documentation is always an issue. In order to develop with GeneXus, there is very little documentation. The documentation is not clear enough in order to develop a great tool."

"It's expensive for a company."

"We would like to see more extensions and more user controls added to the front-end of this solution, in order to help developers manage the website."

"It would be helpful to have additional assisted processing with training."

"There are issues in integrating it with other solutions."

"The graphical interface could be improved. I also notice some performance problems on hardware that should be more than adequate. GeneXus uses a lot of RAM and other computer resources."

"The tool needs to be tuned before being used. You need some experience to get the best out of the tool."

"I told them to add something about Angular. They're already working on adding it."

More GeneXus cons

"The file size is a bit big, so you have to make certain layers."

"It needs offline sync capabilities to store data on devices persistently."

"Xamarin's profiling tools are only available for the highest tier of MSDN subscription and compatibility with platform-native profiling tools is rather lacking. This causes friction when working on performance-related issues."

"The problem that I faced was that the communication, the roles, and the responsibilities, weren't defined between Microsoft and Xamarin."

"The solution does not include Hot Reload which is painful because it causes us to wait quite some time for huge builds."

"Xamarin Platform's performance base could be improved."

"For those who use only XAML to design the UI, it would be better if there was a better XAML previewer or designer."

"The application platform could be improved."

More Xamarin Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of a GeneXus license is extremely high. At the same time, one person using the solution can do the work of three Java or data developers. I think that's why they charge so much. It's too expensive, which is one reason it isn't widely used."

"People tend to work with GeneXus if it's cheap, but GeneXus does have licensing policies...Moreover, the cost of resourcing work in GeneXus may make it more expensive than other programming languages."

"I don't know about the price because I am an employee, but I hear it's cheaper than other tools."

"I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten"

"The price is good."

"This solution offers multi-plan licenses, depending on the size of the company and the features required, as opposed to being priced per user/device."

"The tool's price is good."

"It's expensive. I'd rate it a four out of ten in terms of pricing."

More GeneXus pricing and cost advice

"You can build in Xamarin without paying any money."

"My company provided all the licenses that we need to support our use of Xamarin Platform."

"In most cases, it is sufficient to have free/community license. But if you plan to seriously develop production-level, highly polished apps, you need to use Xamarin.Profiler and the professional or enterprise license."

"It saved a lot of time and resources needed to develop a cross platform mobile app."

"Xamarin is free. There is no license unless you go for some high-end enterprise features. Other than that, everything's free."

"There's no licensing cost for Xamarin."

"The price of the Xamarin Platform is not expensive. However, the price of the solution depends on the application that is made. For example, if you have small applications, it's different from large or enterprise applications."

"There is no license fee because the solution is open-source."

More Xamarin Platform pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Educational Organization

20%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about GeneXus?

GeneXus evolves with technology.

See all answers

What needs improvement with GeneXus?

GeneXus needs to be more consistent in functionality without any errors. Code generation is highly time-consuming for GeneXus, but in some cases, it saves time as well. Some errors will take too lo...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for GeneXus?

Our company uses the latest version of GeneXus. The solution is used in our company to develop various enterprise systems, and GeneXus is used as an integrator, which further facilitates low-cost d...

See all answers

What do you like most about Xamarin Platform?

Xamarin.Forms are very useful. Essentially, it's a framework that allows me to create the UI mostly in XAML. This XAML code is then translated into the native UI elements for each respective platform.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Xamarin Platform?

Xamarin Platform is free, and we use an Azure subscription at a relatively low cost for our builds. It offers a good value for money, although it requires time to make it work effectively.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Xamarin Platform?

The primary area for improvement is the support for third-party libraries, especially for major providers like Microsoft and Google. The lack of robust documentation and support for third-party bin...

See all answers

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Compared 28% of the time

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Compared 16% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

GeneXus

May 2025

Download GeneXus product report

Buyer's Guide

Xamarin Platform

April 2025

Download Xamarin Platform product report

Overview

What is GeneXus? GeneXus™ is the best Low-Code Platform that you don't know yet.

It's a Software Development Platform that simplifies and automates the tasks of creating and evolving enterprise applications and multi-channel user-experiences. Great Advantages:

- Higher productivity, with automatic maintenance & evolution
- Multi-Experience, we continuously create new code generators
- Agile, incremental approach, with fully functional prototypes
- Easier to learn, one single language to cover all technologies
- Future-proof, we've been around for 30 years, evolving for you

Key Differentiators against the competition:

- No runtime fees, we charge by developer
- Best theoretical framework, which allows us to evolve
- Best coverage in the market: Most technologies, most languages, most markets and industries
- We run on-premise or on the cloud
- Multiple starting points depending on the type of company you work in, with products for Students, Startups, ISVs, Corporate Development, and SAP technologies

GeneXus uses Artificial Intelligence techniques to create software, enabling truly incremental development of apps, providing a low-code, future-proof development platform for the leading execution platforms and languages, and the most popular DBMS.

GeneXus

Xamarin is an open-source platform for developing modern and performant applications for iOS, Android, and Windows using.NET. Xamarin is an abstraction layer that manages how shared code is communicated to the platform's underlying code. Xamarin is for developers with the two following goals:

Cross-platform sharing of code, tests, and business logic.
Writing cross-platform apps in C# with Visual Studio.

Xamarin allows developers to share an average of 90% of their program across platforms. This enables programmers to achieve native performance, look, and feel on each platform while writing all of their business logic in a single language (or reusing existing application code).

Xamarin applications can be created on a PC or a Mac and compiled into native application packages, such as an .apk file for Android or an .ipa file for iOS.

Xamarin Platform Features

Xamarin Platform has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Complete binding for the supporting SDKs: Xamarin includes bindings for almost all of the underlying platform SDKs in iOS and Android.
Java, C, Objective-C, C, C++ Interop: Xamarin gives you the ability to use a variety of third-party code by providing tools for directly invoking Objective-C, Java, C, and C++ libraries.
Modern language constructs: Xamarin applications are written in C#, a modern language with many capabilities that Objective-C and Java do not have, like lambdas, LINQ, parallel programming, generics, and more.
Strong base class library (BCL): Xamarin apps use the .NET BCL, a large collection of classes with streamlined features, like powerful XML, database, serialization, IO, string, and networking support, among others.

Xamarin Platform Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing the Xamarin Platform. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Native UIs and APIs: Xamarin delivers comprehensive access to each platform's native SDK and UI controls, projecting the entire native API of each device into C#. Therefore, the apps you develop are native instead of write-once/run-anywhere programs that look alien on every platform. Xamarin provides you access to all of the capabilities that distinguish each platform.

Share code between platforms: With Xamarin, you can share all code across platforms while providing a native user interface tailored to each individual device. With Xamarin, you can execute the same C# code on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. With Xamarin, your software is compiled to a native binary rather than being interpreted, in contrast to other cross-platform frameworks. Even in the most demanding situations, native compilation provides users with excellent app performance. Xamarin provides responsive, multi-user input and feedback, fluid scrolling, sophisticated graphics and animations, complicated data visualization, and realistic high frame rates for games.

Code with C#: Write shorter, more concise, and more maintainable code by leveraging advanced language features, such as Language Integrated Query (LINQ), delegates, lambdas, events, garbage collection, and many other features. With Xamarin's fully extensible platform, you can include libraries written in C, Objective-C, C++, or Java. In C#, you have access to the entire native ecosystem of components and libraries.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Canal de Panamá, Gerdau, Coca-Cola, Mercado Libre, DHL, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, TECNISA, Mexican Polak Group, Ferrovalle, Canon, Azteca, KPMG, TURBUS, Santander, BBVA

Cinemark, MixRadio, Sqor Sports, Storyo, JetBlue, The World Bank, Cr_dito Agrcola, Applied Research Associates

Buyer's Guide

GeneXus vs. Xamarin Platform

April 2025

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