Cordova versus phonegap

There has been a lot of confusion and questions about Cordova and phonegap. Also, many people ask questions about which to use with Ionic. Although Ionic uses Cordova, we can also definitely use phonegap. Many still don't know about Cordova as phonegap is before phonegap.
Let's quickly look back at its history; phonegap was created in 2009 by Nitobi. Later in 2011, Adobe took over Nitobi along with the rights to the phonegap platform. The Open source core code of the platform was donated to the Apache organization for further development. Phonegap is also free and open source. Initially, there was minimal difference between Cordova and phonegap, but slowly Adobe started building a proprietary set of services around phonegap. Phonegap build is one of those services.
Cordova is the engine that powers phonegap, similar to webkit, which is the engine for the Chrome browser. There have...