I feel that the Ionic CLI is pretty good, but it does not have a workflow associated with it. When I say workflow, I mean a demarcation between the development code and production code. In the project scaffolded by the Ionic CLI, the www folder hosts both the development code and production code. This will become an issue very fast when your app starts growing.
This is where generator-ionic proves to be invaluable. The generator-ionic is a Yeoman generator that is used to scaffold Ionic projects. If you did not already know this, Yeoman is a scaffolding tool that uses Grunt, Bower, and Yo to scaffold apps. Of late, they've started supporting gulp as well.
Note
Why Yeoman?
Unlike the IDEs for other languages, JavaScript or web development does not have a unified development environment, where a user would navigate to File | New | AngularJS project or File | New | HTML5 project. This is where Yeoman fits in.
Ionic has its own CLI to scaffold apps. But for other frameworks, which...