How does Flutter Web's rendering engines (CanvasKit vs HTML) differ?

Updated Apr 28, 2026

Short answer

Flutter Web provides two engines: HTML uses standard DOM/CSS/Canvas, while CanvasKit uses WebAssembly and Skia.

HTML renderer translates Flutter primitives to DOM elements and standard canvas. It has a small download size but struggles with complex, high-fidelity graphics. 2. CanvasKit downloads a WebAssembly version of the Skia engine. It offers pixel-perfect rendering identical to mobile and high performance, but adds roughly 1.5MB-2MB to the initial payload.

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