I'm currently using Ionic to create an app for my thesis.
Ionic itself is based on angular, so if you're familiar with that, that's a great plus.
For building the app on ios, you'll still need an apple developer account, so if you're trying to avoid that, bad luck.
It's my first actual app I'm making, so I can't really compare it with anything else, but overall it works decent, except you can't really test native stuff and cordova, because browser doesn't support it (and neither does the devapp).