performance - Android Recyclerview vs ListView with Viewholder

Question

I recently came across the android RecyclerView which was released with Android 5.0 and it seems that RecyclerView is just an encapsulated traditional ListView with the ViewHolder pattern incorporated into it, which promotes the reuse of the view, rather than creating it every single time.

What are the other benefits of using RecyclerView ? If both have the same effect in terms of performance, why would one prefer RecyclerView` ?

Edit

I found that people have asked similar question and the answers are not conclusive, adding them here for record keeping.

Recyclerview vs Listview

Should we use RecyclerView to replace ListView?

Why doesn't RecyclerView have onItemClickListener()? and How RecyclerView is different from Listview?

Answer 1

The other plus of using RecycleView is animation, it can be done in two lines of code

RecyclerView.ItemAnimator itemAnimator = new DefaultItemAnimator();
        recyclerView.setItemAnimator(itemAnimator);

But the widget is still raw, e.g you can't create header and footer.