Electron vs GraphQL

Overview

Electron

Stacks11.6K

Followers10.0K

Votes148

GraphQL

Stacks34.9K

Followers28.1K

Votes309

Electron vs GraphQL: What are the differences?

Electron: 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; GraphQL: A data query language and runtime. GraphQL is a data query language and runtime designed and used at Facebook to request and deliver data to mobile and web apps since 2012.

Electron belongs to "Cross-Platform Desktop Development" category of the tech stack, while GraphQL can be primarily classified under "Query Languages".

Some of the features offered by Electron are:

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.

On the other hand, GraphQL provides the following key features:

Hierarchical
Product-centric
Client-specified queries

"Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications" is the primary reason why developers consider Electron over the competitors, whereas "Schemas defined by the requests made by the user" was stated as the key factor in picking GraphQL.

Electron and GraphQL are both open source tools. It seems that Electron with 74.4K GitHub stars and 9.72K forks on GitHub has more adoption than GraphQL with 11.7K GitHub stars and 752 GitHub forks.

StackShare, Twitter, and Intuit are some of the popular companies that use GraphQL, whereas Electron is used by Slack, WebbyLab, and triGo GmbH. GraphQL has a broader approval, being mentioned in 541 company stacks & 715 developers stacks; compared to Electron, which is listed in 213 company stacks and 366 developer stacks.

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)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

Electron	GraphQL
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.	GraphQL is a data query language and runtime designed and used at Facebook to request and deliver data to mobile and web apps since 2012.
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	Hierarchical;Product-centric;Client-specified queries;Backwards Compatible;Structured, Arbitrary Code;Application-Layer Protocol;Strongly-typed;Introspective
Statistics
Stacks 11.6K	Stacks 34.9K
Followers 10.0K	Followers 28.1K
Votes 148	Votes 309
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 Does not native 4 No proper documentation 1 Wrong reference for dom inspection	Pros 75 Schemas defined by the requests made by the user 63 Will replace RESTful interfaces 62 The future of API's 49 The future of databases 12 Self-documenting Cons 4 More code to type. 4 Hard to migrate from GraphQL to another technology 2 Takes longer to build compared to schemaless. 1 No built in security 1 N+1 fetch problem

What are some alternatives to Electron, GraphQL?

Prisma

Prisma is an open-source database toolkit. It replaces traditional ORMs and makes database access easy with an auto-generated query builder for TypeScript & Node.js.

PostGraphile

Execute one command (or mount one Node.js middleware) and get an instant high-performance GraphQL API for your PostgreSQL database

OData

It is an ISO/IEC approved, OASIS standard that defines a set of best practices for building and consuming RESTful APIs. It helps you focus on your business logic while building RESTful APIs without having to worry about the various approaches to define request and response headers, status codes, HTTP methods, URL conventions, media types, payload formats, query options, etc.

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

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

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

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

Build OS X desktop apps using React Native.

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.