StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Cross Platform Desktop Development
  5. NodeGUI vs Photon

NodeGUI vs Photon

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Photon
Photon
Stacks32
Followers89
Votes0
GitHub Stars10.1K
Forks573
NodeGUI
NodeGUI
Stacks15
Followers109
Votes6
GitHub Stars9.1K
Forks308

Photon vs NodeGUI: What are the differences?

What is Photon? Framework for Electron apps. The fastest way to build beautiful Electron apps using simple HTML and CSS. Underneath it all is Electron. Originally built for GitHub's Atom text editor, Electron is the easiest way to build cross-platform desktop applications.

What is NodeGUI? *A library for building cross-platform native desktop applications *. It is an open source library for building cross-platform native desktop applications with JavaScript and CSS like styling. It is based on Qt5 and NOT chromium, hence it is memory and cpu efficient.

Photon and NodeGUI belong to "Cross-Platform Desktop Development" category of the tech stack.

Photon and NodeGUI are both open source tools. It seems that Photon with 9.12K GitHub stars and 528 forks on GitHub has more adoption than NodeGUI with 2.35K GitHub stars and 34 GitHub forks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

Photon
Photon
NodeGUI
NodeGUI

The fastest way to build beautiful Electron apps using simple HTML and CSS. Underneath it all is Electron. Originally built for GitHub's Atom text editor, Electron is the easiest way to build cross-platform desktop applications.

It is an open source library for building cross-platform native desktop applications with JavaScript and CSS like styling. It is based on Qt5 and NOT chromium, hence it is memory and cpu efficient.

-
Cross platform;Low CPU and memory footprint;Styling with CSS ;Complete Nodejs api support ;Good Devtools support
Statistics
GitHub Stars
10.1K
GitHub Stars
9.1K
GitHub Forks
573
GitHub Forks
308
Stacks
32
Stacks
15
Followers
89
Followers
109
Votes
0
Votes
6
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 1
    Its not hybrid & fully native.
  • 1
    Easy to make cross platform & resource efficient apps
  • 1
    Rich API which binds C++ QT
  • 1
    No webkit thus super resource efficient
  • 1
    It uses Qode which is a fork of Node to be used with QT
Cons
  • 1
    Doesn't have x86 support
Integrations
Electron
Electron
Linux
Linux
JavaScript
JavaScript
Node.js
Node.js
TypeScript
TypeScript
Windows
Windows
CSS 3
CSS 3
macOS
macOS
Qt
Qt

What are some alternatives to Photon, NodeGUI?

Electron

Electron

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. The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on io.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor.

Sciter

Sciter

It brings a stack of web technologies to desktop UI development. Web designers, and developers, can reuse their experience and expertise in creating modern looking desktop applications.

wxWidgets

wxWidgets

It is a C++ library that lets developers create applications for Windows, macOS, Linux and other platforms with a single code base. It has popular language bindings for Python, Perl, Ruby and many other languages, and unlike other cross-platform toolkits, it gives applications a truly native look and feel because it uses the platform's native API rather than emulating the GUI. It's also extensive, free, open-source and mature.

Qt5

Qt5

It is a full development framework with tools designed to streamline the creation of applications and user interfaces for desktop, embedded, and mobile platforms.

JavaFX

JavaFX

It is a set of graphics and media packages that enables developers to design, create, test, debug, and deploy rich client applications that operate consistently across diverse platforms.

React Native Desktop

React Native Desktop

Build OS X desktop apps using React Native.

JUCE

JUCE

It is a C++ framework for low-latency applications, with cross-platform GUI libraries to get your apps running on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android.

Proton Native

Proton Native

Create native desktop applications through a React syntax, on all platforms.

pygame

pygame

It is a cross-platform set of Python modules designed for writing video games. It includes computer graphics and sound libraries designed to be used with the Python programming language.

SDL

SDL

It is a cross-platform development library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware via OpenGL and Direct3D.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase