People keep asking me, "Lovable or Rork — which one should I use?" Before answering, I always ask one thing back: "Where does this app need to live in the end?"
Lining up feature tables and crowning a winner actually makes this comparison harder to reason about. Both start from the same idea — building apps with AI — but the place the app lives is fundamentally different. Once that's settled, pricing and minor feature gaps become secondary.
The core difference — where the app runs
Lovable's home turf is web apps; Rork's is native smartphone apps. Their stacks diverge accordingly — React + Supabase versus React Native (Expo) — and that's not a gap you reconcile later. Here's the shape of it:
| Item | Lovable | Rork |
|---|---|---|
| Primary platform | Web apps | Mobile apps (iOS / Android) |
| Tech stack | React + Supabase | React Native (Expo) |
| Target users | Web devs, startups | Aspiring mobile app makers |
| Monthly pricing | From $20 | From $25 |
| Free plan | Yes (limited) | No |
| App Store publishing | Not supported | Supported |
The price difference is only about $5 a month, so there's little to agonize over there. What matters are the bottom two rows: whether there's a free plan, and whether you can ship to a store.
When Lovable is the better fit
If you want to get a web app into shape fast, Lovable is a pleasant place to work. React component generation is quick, and because Supabase integration is native, you can carry a project from database design through to the frontend in a single environment. Generated code syncs to GitHub, so it feels natural to developers who want to customize it afterward. Publishing is close to one click, and custom domains are easy to set up.
The free plan is a real advantage for a first step, too. Before you've decided exactly what to build, you can just touch it and get a feel for it.
When Rork is the better fit
If you want your work sitting on the App Store or Google Play, Rork is the answer. It generates native apps that actually install on a device — something web builders fundamentally can't do. The higher Rork Max tier reaches further, into camera, GPS, push notifications, and HealthKit: features that only mean anything on mobile.
Rork's "Fix Now," which detects runtime errors and proposes fixes, is its own mechanism. On mobile, where device-to-device variation is large, that kind of automatic repair pays off more directly than it does on the web.
What the table doesn't show
From here, let me share what doesn't fit in a feature table — from someone who has shipped apps solo for about 12 years (it has added up to roughly 50 million downloads).
The apps I run are wallpaper apps and calming-themed apps. They assume they'll sit on a home screen, call the device's wallpaper-setting APIs, and push notifications about new content. At that point, no matter how good a web builder's developer experience is, it's off the table. That's what I mean by "where it runs" mattering before how good the features are. The same goes if you monetize through a mobile ad SDK like AdMob — there's simply nowhere to embed it on the web side.
One more honest note, about store submission. After shipping since 2014, what I feel most keenly is that the real hard part of mobile development isn't writing code — it's getting through review. Provisioning, signing, App Store rejections and resubmissions: that's where the time melts away. So when you evaluate Rork, don't stop at "it can generate a native app." Look at "how much of that submission mountain does it carry for me?" Treat generation not as the finish line but as the moment you reach the entrance to review, and you won't misjudge your expectations.
On "Fix Now" as well: even when something looks fixed in the preview, I always reproduce it on a real device. Mobile runtime errors change their face across device generations and OS versions, so the round trip between simulator and hardware is a step you can't skip.
How to choose
The call is simple. If what you want to build is complete in a browser, choose Lovable; if it has to run inside a phone, choose Rork. If you haven't decided what to build yet, get your hands moving in Lovable's free tier, and the moment you feel "this only works as a phone app," move to Rork. That order wastes the least money and time.
As a next step, write your idea in a single sentence, then add "opens in a browser" or "sits on the home screen" to the end of it. That one phrase decides which tool you should reach for.