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...