Ionic is great when you just need a UI layer and you take the responsibility of creating a backend. Meteor is more of a full-stack solution. So, why not combine both - Ionic and Meteor? So, here comes Meteoric. Meteoric aims to replace the Angular directives in Ionic with Meteor Blaze templates. Although I have never used it, I have heard many good things about it. So, if you want to build cross platform UIs for Android and iOS I will suggest you to give it a try.

as @Audrey mentioned Ionic is more of UI Layer and you need to take care of building your backend, and Meteor is full stack solution. Most of them had this opinion of why not combine these 2? and there came meteoric library. I tried it, it is good enough for typical apps when you are happy just using standard UI components from the library. There are some issues with compiling the app with library as well. So it is not very smooth. It is more of personal preference. But if you ask me, if you have previous experience in angular, I would recommend you to do Ionic. if you are fresh I would recommend Meteor. Meteor is quick to learn and the concepts are simple than angular(my perspective). And meteor has got good community support where you get many different things for your app in terms of packages which is great and helps you move fast.

There are some talks on people trying Meteor + Semantic Ui Meteor + Polymer - Material design Meteor + Famo.us

So now you don't really need to choose. You can use Ionic on top of the Meteor platform with the new angular-meteor release and the new official support of Meteor in Ionic. Also, you can use a separate Meteor server with Meteor client side with Bower on top of a regular Ionic CLI. Here is the same app, ones with the Ionic CLI and Meteor client side with Bower: github.com/idanwe/meetup-NY-ionic-chat and one with the full Meteor platform: github.com/idanwe/meetup-NY-meteor-ionic-chat You can check those out and compare by yourself. I personally think the with the Meteor platform you get a more full support for the entire platform, you write less code and the infrastructure is more reliable, But also Ionic has many really good tools and services like Ionic Push etc...