desktop VS Electron

Compare desktop vs Electron and see what are their differences.

desktop

Focus on what matters instead of fighting with Git. (by desktop)

Electron

:electron: Build cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS (by electron)
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desktop Electron
214 236
19,141 111,866
1.2% 1.1%
9.9 9.8
4 days ago 4 days ago
TypeScript C++
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

desktop

Posts with mentions or reviews of desktop. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-22.

Electron

Posts with mentions or reviews of Electron. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-29.
  • Release Radar • February 2024 Edition
    13 projects | dev.to | 29 Feb 2024
    The team at Electron have been faithfully shipping new releases almost every single month. I think they had Christmas off 🤔. This popular framework has developers writing cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. The latest update depreciates some process events, and added new modules, APIs, methods, and more. Read into all the changes in the Electron release notes. This month, Electron also introduced a new formal RFC process.
  • The IDEs we had 30 years ago and we lost
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Dec 2023
    VS Code has been crashing at launch in Wayland since more than eight months ago:

    https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/37531

  • Design Systems with Web Components
    5 projects | dev.to | 18 Dec 2023
    So we talked a lot about the Atomic Design Principle, but you could just use that in any system and start creating. You could have Angular components, React Components, and Vue Components. But if you notice these don't easily work Everwhere. So the solution is to use Web Components because the modern browser can already understand these, and any Front-End framework can then utilize these components. You can use Electron for desktop (Slack, VSCode), PWA for both Android and iOS, and across all browsers Can I Use.
  • Settings · Rulesets · electron/electron
    1 project | /r/europe | 8 Nov 2023
  • How I got Wayland, Vulkan, and hardware acceleration working with Figma on Fedora 39.
    2 projects | /r/linux | 7 Nov 2023
    I'm noticing a significant boost in performance, crisper text, and better power savings. The only shortcoming is that the window which Figma will run on will lose its shadow. This is due to a technical limitation with frameless windows on Linux.
  • Building Apps with Tauri and Elixir
    14 projects | dev.to | 19 Oct 2023
    For the longest time, building desktop apps was a daunting task to web developers. That is, until technologies like Electron made creating these apps more approachable to a wider audience. Today, we’ve got a wide array of native applications built with solutions like Electron, Tauri, Capacitor, and many more. While these are great solutions, sometimes configuration can be tricky and the applications we create can become somewhat bloated in terms of memory usage.
  • MS Teams & Electron libwebp 0-Day Vulnerability
    1 project | /r/MicrosoftTeams | 30 Sep 2023
    Electron patch for version 27: https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/39823
  • CVE-2023-4863: Heap buffer overflow in WebP (Chrome)
    18 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Sep 2023
    It does, see [0]. Fun fact: Signal desktop, which uses Electron under the hood, is running without sandbox on Linux [1][2].

    [0] https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/39824

    [1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/5195

    [2] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/pull/4381

  • Capturing at Speed of Thought
    1 project | dev.to | 7 Sep 2023
    Turns out, there is an issue with the electron window not returning focus correctly on mac - https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/5495. The trick to solving is to treat quick capture as a screensaver. When closing, you hide it by setting the opacity to 0 and sending hide: command to the first responder.
  • $Home, Not So Sweet $Home
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Aug 2023
    Open since 2016! https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/8124

What are some alternatives?

When comparing desktop and Electron you can also consider the following projects:

MK2360 - Convert mouse and keyboard input to xbox 360 controller output

tauri - Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend.

notion-app - Notion for Linux

dotenv - Loads environment variables from .env for nodejs projects.

mackup - Keep your application settings in sync (OS X/Linux)

Eel - A little Python library for making simple Electron-like HTML/JS GUI apps

git-lfs - Git extension for versioning large files

puppeteer - Node.js API for Chrome

DropPoint - Make drag-and-drop easier using DropPoint. Drag content without having to open side-by-side windows

react-native - A framework for building native applications using React

bitwarden - Bitwarden client applications (web, browser extension, desktop, and cli) [Moved to: https://github.com/bitwarden/clients]

cheerio - The fast, flexible, and elegant library for parsing and manipulating HTML and XML.