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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Cross Platform Desktop Development
  5. Electron vs Gallium

Electron vs Gallium

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Electron
Electron
Stacks11.6K
Followers10.0K
Votes148
Gallium
Gallium
Stacks0
Followers10
Votes0
GitHub Stars3.7K
Forks134

Electron vs Gallium: What are the differences?

Developers describe Electron as "Build cross platform desktop apps with web technologies. Formerly known as Atom Shell, made by GitHub". 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. On the other hand, Gallium is detailed as "Build desktop applications in Go and HTML". Gallium is a Go library for managing windows, menus, dock icons, and desktop notifications. Each window contains a webview component, in which you code your UI in HTML. Under the hood, the webview is running Chromium.

Electron and Gallium belong to "Cross-Platform Desktop Development" category of the tech stack.

Electron and Gallium are both open source tools. It seems that Electron with 74.4K GitHub stars and 9.72K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Gallium with 3.63K GitHub stars and 132 GitHub forks.

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Advice on Electron, Gallium

Semih
Semih

Software Engineering Manager

Oct 1, 2020

Needs adviceonJavaScriptJavaScriptHTML5HTML5.NET.NET

Hi,

We are planning to develop a brand new UX for an already existing desktop software. The previous version is developed on C#.NET with Winforms & WPF. Our plan is to use JavaScript/HTML5 based frontend technologies for the new software. For some components, we are highly dependent on .NET/ .NET Core because the JS-based versions are not mature enough.

What would you choose for a desktop-based Engineering Software that supports multi-OS and has rich UI capabilities considering the .NET dependencies?

Thanks in advance,

Semih

57.9k views57.9k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Electron
Electron
Gallium
Gallium

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.

Gallium is a Go library for managing windows, menus, dock icons, and desktop notifications. Each window contains a webview component, in which you code your UI in HTML. Under the hood, the webview is running Chromium.

Use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with Chromium and Node.js to build your app.;Electron is open source; maintained by GitHub and an active community.;Electron apps build and run on Mac, Windows, and Linux.;Automatic updates;Crash reporting;Windows installers;Debugging & profiling;Native menus & notifications
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
3.7K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
134
Stacks
11.6K
Stacks
0
Followers
10.0K
Followers
10
Votes
148
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 69
    Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications
  • 53
    Open source
  • 14
    Great looking apps such as Slack and Visual Studio Code
  • 8
    Because it's cross platform
  • 4
    Use Node.js in the Main Process
Cons
  • 19
    Uses a lot of memory
  • 8
    User experience never as good as a native app
  • 4
    No proper documentation
  • 4
    Does not native
  • 1
    Wrong reference for dom inspection
No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to Electron, Gallium?

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.

NodeGUI

NodeGUI

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.

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.

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