Difference between ionic app development and simply using phonegap

1] Both Phonegap and Ionic build their app using apache cordova.

2] Javascript framework

- Phonegap app development don't impose any restrictions of framework being used. It just need the knowledge of HTML5, CSS and javascript.
- Ionic framwork is itself built using Angularjs. Therefore we must have knowledge of Angularjs.

3] Look and feel

- In case of phonegap, you need to be very expert in CSS to achieve richer look and feel to be comparable with native.
- As ionic has inheritance in AngularJS, they had written custom UI elements using AngularJS directives. You can see every UI element rendering on page as native one.

4] Tweaking with different platform

- In phonegap, Your app UI has consistent appearance on different platform. App dont appear as native one. Otherwise you need to take many efforts to make them feel like native one.
- Ionic apply platform wise theme to the app. All the process of adding theme done in app build process. Thus no more boilerplate code.

5] Accessing native functions

- In Phonegap we can choose any plugin of our choice.
- Ionic provide native API built on top of cordova plugins. Ionic has defined custom interfaces for cordova plugins to make life easy. They have made right choices of cordova plugins. You need not to try different plugings and choose correct one. Still we are free to choose others.

6] 300ms delay

- Ionic has fixed 300ms delay problem. Clickable UI elements detect click immediately.
- Phonegap app appear slow. Clicks are detected after 300ms delay. We can use Fastclickjs but I think that doesn't solve problem much as expected.

7] Build process

- Phonegap has provide cloud service to build the app for different platform on cloud. Phonegap also provide cli to build the apps.
- Ionic dont provide cloud to build the apps. They provided cli to build apps.

8] Implementation

- Coding in ionic is easy. You just need to rearrange the readymade blocks to get the things running. Ionic Cli also provided commands to create Angular components and providers.
- Phonegap: Need to code every small unit.