Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Xamarin VS Packer

Compare Xamarin VS Packer and see what are their differences

Xamarin logo Xamarin

Create iOS, Android and Mac apps in C#

Packer logo Packer

Packer is an open-source software for creating identical machine images from a single source configuration.
  • Xamarin Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-17
  • Packer Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-15

Xamarin videos

Pros and Cons of Xamarin Development

More videos:

  • Review - Is Xamarin Forms Any Good?
  • Review - Why Xamarin Is Awesome

Packer videos

No Packer videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Xamarin and Packer)
Developer Tools
76 76%
24% 24
DevOps Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Development Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Continuous Integration And Delivery

User comments

Share your experience with using Xamarin and Packer. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Xamarin and Packer

Xamarin Reviews

Explore 9 Top Eclipse Alternatives for 2024
Xamarin.Forms An open-source UI framework that enables developers to conjure up applications for Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, and Windows from a singular shared codebase. Offers rich features like XAML user-interface language, databinding, gestures, effects, styling.
Source: aircada.com
Top 10 Flutter Alternatives for Cross-Platform App Development
Developed and launched by Microsoft, Xamarin facilitates developers to build apps for iOS and Android by using C# and .NET. It ensures a seamless integration with Visual Studio and lets developers experience a fully familiar environment. The framework provides a single codebase and allows developers to perform app development rapidly.
Exploring 15 Powerful Flutter Alternatives
Xamarin is a Microsoft-created framework for building native iOS, Android, and Windows apps in C#/.NET. On the complexity front, Xamarin apps generally require more focus on memory management and garbage collection tuning relative to alternatives like Flutter. The additional diligence pays dividends in runtime performance when done properly. However, developers with...
THE BEST 34 APP DEVELOPMENT SOFTWARE IN 2022 LIST
Xamarin is a Microsoft-owned tool to write native code for apps. Free. Cross-platform. Open-source. An app platform for building Android and iOS apps with .NET and C#.
9 Of The Best Android Studio Alternatives To Try Out
You can also access the required resources at the Xamarin Universal project. You can stay up to date with the latest updates by subscribing to their YouTube channel or blogs. The Xamarin community is most active, and you can get answers to your questions swiftly.

Packer Reviews

Introduction to Top Open Source Virtualization Tools
Packer is notably light, high performing, and operates on every major operating system. It assembles and configures all the necessary components for a virtual machine then creates images that run on multiple platforms. Packer doesn’t replace configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef; as a matter of fact, when creating images, Packer can utilize tools like Puppet or...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Xamarin should be more popular than Packer. It has been mentiond 27 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Xamarin mentions (27)

  • C# Fundamentals
    Mobile Applications: With Xamarin, a cross-platform mobile development framework, developers can write C# code to build native Android, iOS, and Windows mobile applications. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Making an android app with c#
    Xamarin - Basically an older version of MAUI. I would advise against creating new projects on Xamarin since MAUI is supposed to render it obsolete. Source: over 1 year ago
  • App developer
    Microsoft Xamarin: For this you'll need to know C# and .net. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • I own a web development company in San Antonio and I'm looking for ideas to support the UTSA students with some sort of free courses or classes
    At my internship, we moved to Microsoft's Visual Studio for C# development from Java, and for application development we use Xamarin which can be used on Windows and Mac. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Where to begin with idea?
    Of course, Unity is better with games. So, alternatives include MAUI, which is the new hip thing that Microsoft wants people to switch to. There is also WPF, WinForms, UWP, and Xamarin, which are compared nicely in this Reddit thread. Source: almost 2 years ago
View more

Packer mentions (9)

  • Failed to connect to the host via SSH on Ubuntu 22.04
    If you have just upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04, and you suddenly experience either errors when trying to ssh into hosts, or when running ansible or again when running the ansible provisioner building a packer image, this is probably going to be useful for you. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Create a minimalist OS using Docker Containers and Hashicorp Packer
    I am already using Hashicorp Packer at work and for personal projects and I wanted to test This idea out by wrapping it a single Packer Template file. This reduces the level of maintaining a lot of small scripts, Dockerfiles and configurations and the user can simply trigger a couple of Commands to get a minimalist OS at the end of the process. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.
    And while it is a slight increase in complexity, it can be an overall net gain in functionality, configurability and reliability. Much like Packer is far more reliable and practical than manually making VM images sitting in front of a terminal, even though making the initial configuration takes some time. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Customized Ubuntu Images using Packer + QEMU + Cloud-Init & UEFI bootloading
    Hashicorp Packer provides a nice wrapper / abstraction over the QEMU in order to boot the image and use it to set it up on first-boot. Instead of writing really long commands in order to boot up the image using QEMU, Packer provided a nice Configuration Template in a more Readable fashion. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • The journey of sharing a wired USB printer over the network
    Packer seemed like the perfect tool for the job. I have never used it before and wanted to get familiar with the tool. It doesn't come with ARM support out of the box, but there are two community projects to fill that niche. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Xamarin and Packer, you can also consider the following products

Android Studio - Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA

Terraform - Tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently.

OutSystems - Build Enterprise-Grade Apps Fast.

Rancher - Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service

Xcode - Xcode is Apple’s powerful integrated development environment for creating great apps for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Xcode 4 includes the Xcode IDE, instruments, iOS Simulator, and the latest Mac OS X and iOS SDKs.

Puppet Enterprise - Get started with Puppet Enterprise, or upgrade or expand.