If you're in the process of evaluating Qt alternatives for embedded GUI software design and development options, then you've come to the right place.
As a top embedded UI design and development partner of global Fortune 500 companies and #1-referred by our hardware partners, Crank Software helps clients create award-winning UI experiences that exceed customer expectations using our software, Storyboard. We've helped consumer, industrial, medical, and automotive companies win UI design awards for touch screen devices around the world. Coca-Cola, Vorwerk Thermomix, GE Appliances, and John Deere all rely on Storyboard to create future-proof embedded graphics that customers want to interact with.
The quick answer is that there is no comparison. Qt is a large C++ library of functionality and is designed to let you do many things, while Storyboard is a purpose-built platform for fast UI development and optimized performance. But it’s important to go beyond the quick answer and explain exactly what makes Storyboard different.
Time to execution and overall cost
If you're a UI designer, it's safe to say that you would rather focus on creating the best user experience than figuring out Qt object properties, sizes of data types, and build specs.
Storyboard makes sure both designers and developers are supported with functions and workflows that are familiar (hello, Photoshop, Illustrator and Sketch!) and require little effort to learn.
By allowing designers to work within Adobe Photoshop (Illustrator or Sketch), import the design files and run on their chosen hardware, Storyboard eliminates the compromises historically made when converting from design to code. If you have a button coloured, shaded, and cornered just as you like it in your design file, it'll look exactly the same in Storyboard.
In contrast, Qt forces designers to think and act like a developer, requiring them to not only understand markup language and text editors, but also use widgets that have the same look and feel as every other application written in Qt. Qt widgets are customizable but that incurs time and cost.
Custom widgets are also not as easily maintained as using the Photoshop re-import and graphical compare tools in Storyboard. These let you iterate designs, compare differences between versions, and select the objects you want - all within a visual WYSIWYG interface. This reduces the time and frustration of going back and forth between designer intent and developer reality.
Qt Creator is an integrated development environment first and foremost, offering pre-packaged UI elements and requiring that users operate like a developer; quickly moving from the visual interface into text editors, properties, and C++ code. Qt Creator does make UI layout easier for a developer but doesn't provide all the design, layout, and animation capabilities that a designer needs to create UIs.
The look of an embedded GUI is half the story; the other half is adding animations and behaviours. Those familiar with Qt will know that animations are specified in code, such as object states and transitions defined through the methods and properties of the QML language. The typical workflow involves coding up logic in an editor, testing the changes, and iterating until you get the experience you want.
In Storyboard, an alternative to Qt, animations are added using an animation timeline, similar to what you would find in any video editing tool. This makes it easy to manipulate what the animations are doing and see the timing relationships between elements. Storyboard also provides an animation recording capability, letting you drag, drop, and change the state of objects in the visual editor for playback at runtime.
When it comes to scripting, Storyboard uses Lua scripts for more sophisticated object behaviours and event handling between the front and back ends of the application.
These features allow your team to work with the true image assets, animations, and behavior in Storyboard, while Qt provides an abstract source code representation of your UI.
When it comes to the performance of your embedded GUI, there are three key factors that separate Storyboard from Qt’s GUI design tool:
An embedded GUI app created using Storyboard is simply a data model and engine, both optimized with a reduced semantic set and tuned by us to squeeze the best possible performance out of the specific operating system and hardware it's running on. This includes specialized architecture and graphics acceleration - with no resource-hungry Javascript engine to deal with.
In other words, we've invested hours and hours to ensure that the Storyboard engine runs fast and your application consumes the least amount of resources - the golden ticket when it comes to embedded GUI computing. Storyboard also has a plugin-based architecture, meaning you can configure the app even further to reduce memory consumption.
Conversely, Qt has a large memory footprint and typically pulls in many framework libraries to bloat application size further. While it does offer hardware-based graphics acceleration, support is limited to a few platforms and sometimes relies on software fallbacks to get things done. This is less performant and offers little insight into performance.
While Qt lets you customize build configurations, how libraries are linked, and memory allocation, you need two things to succeed:
Beyond performance, there are two more things to consider when deciding which GUI framework suits your chosen operating system and hardware.
An embedded app created in Storyboard runs on a variety of platform types - from high-performance, multi chip microprocessor boards to single chip, resource-constrained microcontrollers. This is possible due to the optimized, platform-specific architectures and Storyboard engine discussed earlier.
TIP: To speed up your evaluation process, we’ve created Storyboard-built GUI images optimized for your target hardware. Download a demo image, without having to install Storyboard, for platforms including: NXP, STMicroelectronics, Microchip, Toradex, Renesas and more.
Running Qt on an MCU board is possible, but it would take time and knowledge to tune it effectively for the processing power and memory available. Lower-end MPUs also struggle due to resource limitations, leaving mid- to high-end systems as the optimal range where Qt can run with less tuning efforts.
Platform portability and support are key. Whether your embedded GUI project is running ThreadX on an MCU or Linux on an MPU, as production scale and costs increase, it’s important to be set up to switch between hardware. Qt is a large library with many dependencies, so you should consider its suitability for not only your current hardware but future plans as well.
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