A Rork alternative for teams who want to keep the code

It is worth being clear about this, because a lot of comparison content online is out of date. Rork used to generate React Native through Expo. It does not any more. Rork's own documentation says it plainly: "Rork used to build Expo (React Native) apps. Internal benchmarks showed the agent writes better Swift apps, so we switched." New Rork projects are Swift and SwiftUI for iOS, Kotlin and Compose for Android.

So the old argument — native code versus a JavaScript wrapper — no longer separates these two products. Anyone still making it is describing a version of Rork that stopped existing. The real differences are commercial and structural: what native iOS costs, whether your usage is metered, and where the project lives.

Rork's tiers are public. The Free plan builds web apps only, and projects are public. Rork Pro, from $20 a month, adds native Android and private projects. Native iOS is a Rork Max feature, and Rork Max starts at $200 a month.

Modaal builds a native iOS or Android app on the free plan — one active project, unlimited prompts, and code you can export. Pro is €9 a month billed annually, or €15 monthly, and adds unlimited projects, both platforms together, and App Store distribution. There is no higher tier you have to reach to get Swift out of it.

So the comparison at the free end is not close either: Rork Free builds web apps, in public projects. Modaal Free builds the actual native thing.

And the paid gap is not a rounding error. For a solo developer or a two-person team, the difference between $200 a month and €9 a month is the difference between a tool you have to justify and a tool you forget you are paying for.

Rork meters usage in credits. Its documentation defines one as "a unit of AI compute, roughly one request where Rork builds or edits your app," and when you run out, "you can upgrade your plan or wait for your monthly reset."

That model has a specific failure mode, and it is not about the money. It is that debugging becomes expensive at exactly the moment you can least afford hesitation. When a build breaks and you need six attempts to find out why, a metered tool turns each attempt into a small decision about whether to spend. Building software already involves enough friction without adding that.

Modaal does not meter. You bring an agent you already pay for — Claude, Codex, Gemini, Copilot, Cursor, OpenCode and several others are supported — and authenticate it with your existing subscription. Modaal orchestrates it and charges a flat seat. If a feature takes forty iterations, it takes forty iterations.

The honest caveat: if you do not already subscribe to an AI assistant, this is not free. You are paying for two things instead of one. Rork's bundled model is genuinely simpler for someone starting from zero.

With Modaal, there is no export step, because there is nothing to export from. Modaal is a macOS app that drives Xcode on your own machine. The project is a normal Xcode project in a normal folder on your own disk, from the first build. Open it in Xcode without Modaal running. Add Swift packages. Point your own CI at it. Hand it to a contractor. Modaal is the thing that helped you write it, not the place it lives.

Rork's position is reasonable and clearly stated: "Paid users own all generated code," exported through a two-way GitHub integration so you can edit locally and sync back. Two things are worth knowing. Export requires a paid plan, so the free tier gives you no way out. And Rork's export documentation does not specify the exact project format you receive, so if opening the result directly in Xcode matters to you, test it before you commit.

Rork builds on its own machines and submits to App Store Connect for you. Its docs are explicit: "you do not need Xcode, a Mac, or any other build account." You sign in with your Apple Developer credentials, stay present for the two-factor code, and the build appears in App Store Connect.

If you are on Windows or a Chromebook, that is not a convenience — it is the entire product. Modaal cannot help you, because Modaal builds through Xcode and Xcode requires macOS.

Rork has also shipped something genuinely novel in Rork Max, an iPhone app for building and publishing on the go. Note one wrinkle if you go that route: the cloud build path needs no Mac, but installing to a physical device through the Rork Max app requires a one-time setup step on a Mac with Chrome or Edge. The "no Mac needed" claim is true of the cloud path and not of the on-device install path.

Any competent agent can produce a working screen. The question that decides whether a project survives is what the codebase looks like after fifty features have been added by something that does not remember last week.

Modaal scaffolds an explicit architecture up front and holds the agent to it. The production template uses RIBs — Uber's module pattern — giving you an explicit module tree, protocol boundaries between every module, and a navigation tree that is explicit in the router hierarchy. The quick-prototype template uses MVVM instead, keeping the module structure small enough that view models stay unit-testable.

One honest warning, because you should know it before you pick: migrating from MVVM to RIBs is a full rewrite, not a refactor. Choose the production template if there is any chance the thing becomes real.

There is also a Plan toggle. With Plan on, the agent produces a structured feature spec without writing code, and for new projects it first researches the architectural approach, confirms the key decisions with you, and writes a PRD that documents what the app does and what it is deliberately not doing yet. Then you turn Plan off and it implements against that spec, running a build-and-fix loop through Xcode after each step. That is the workflow the phrase "PRD-driven" refers to.

Rork's documentation does not describe an equivalent architectural commitment.