Electron
Build cross platform desktop apps with web technologies
- Free • Open Source
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
What is Electron?
If you can build a website, you can build a desktop app. Electron is a framework for creating native applications with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It takes care of the hard parts so you can focus on the core of your application.
With Electron, creating a desktop application for your company or idea is easy. Initially developed for GitHub's Atom editor, Electron has since been used to create applications by companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Slack, and Docker.
- Electron uses Chromium and Node.js so you can build your app with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
- Electron is an open source project maintained by GitHub and an active community of contributors.
- Compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux, Electron apps build and run on three platforms.
Electron Screenshots
Electron Features
Electron information
- Developed byOpenJS Foundation
- LicensingOpen Source (MIT) and Free product.
- Written in
- RatingAverage rating of 3.3
- Alternatives37 alternatives listed
Supported Languages
- English
GitHub repository
- 106,598 Stars
- 14,485 Forks
- 934 Open Issues
- Updated
Comments and Reviews
Tags
- application-builder
- web-applications
- Web Development
Build cross platform desktop apps with web technologies
Formerly known as Atom Shell.
With Electron, creating a desktop application for your company or idea is easy. Initially developed for GitHub's Atom editor, Electron has since been used to create applications by companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Slack, Docker and Ruvenss IT Consulting Services.
Electron is very easy to use, and its very easy to deploy using electron-builder.
Most of the programs created with this are too memory intensive.
From a developer point of view, the biggest advantage is the possibility for small teams of using established and widely known web technologies to distribute a cross-platform app without much knowledge about native platform APIs. That comes at the cost of sort of having a complete Chrome browser running for every Electron app which is anything but fast or efficient. Really slow compared to native code. And it is unrealistic to provide a user experience which is consistent with established patterns - per platform.
As a user I started trying to avoid Electron-based apps because usually their user experience is bad due to their technological overhead. Widely known chat clients lag and consume an irrational amount of memory because of using this technology, even though the do only simple things. That is a use case that worked smoother years or even decades ago with much slower and more constrained resources.
It's very hard to optimize Electron apps, because it's basically a browser. There's no point in having another browser running on your computer than spending a bit more time making a native app with Qt or some other cross-platform framework.
I started an electron course before a few days and I have to say that framework or how you wanna call that is awesome!
It's slow on starting apps. This problem can be solved by a background daemon which would run on startup; so each app wouldn't download electron resources again. That might make it super fast.