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Electron vs Polymer: 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, Polymer is detailed as "A new library built on top of Web Components, designed to leverage the evolving web platform on modern browsers". Polymer is a new type of library for the web, designed to leverage the existing browser infrastructure to provide the encapsulation and extendability currently only available in JS libraries. Polymer is based on a set of future technologies, including Shadow DOM, Custom Elements and Model Driven Views. Currently these technologies are implemented as polyfills or shims, but as browsers adopt these features natively, the platform code that drives Polymer evacipates, leaving only the value-adds.
Electron and Polymer are primarily classified as "Cross-Platform Desktop Development" and "Front-End Frameworks" tools respectively.
"Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications" is the top reason why over 50 developers like Electron, while over 48 developers mention "Web components" as the leading cause for choosing Polymer.
Electron and Polymer are both open source tools. It seems that Electron with 74.4K GitHub stars and 9.72K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Polymer with 21.1K GitHub stars and 2K GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Electron has a broader approval, being mentioned in 213 company stacks & 366 developers stacks; compared to Polymer, which is listed in 41 company stacks and 30 developer stacks.
Pros of Electron
- Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications69
- Open source53
- Great looking apps such as Slack and Visual Studio Code14
- Because it's cross platform8
- Use Node.js in the Main Process4
Pros of Polymer
- Web components52
- Material design30
- HTML14
- Components13
- Open source5
- It uses the platform4
- Designer friendly. HTMLX concepts3
- Like the interesting naming convention for elements1
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Cons of Electron
- Uses a lot of memory19
- User experience never as good as a native app8
- No proper documentation4
- Does not native4
- Each app needs to install a new chromium + nodejs1
- Wrong reference for dom inspection1
Cons of Polymer
- Last version is like 2 years ago? that's totally rad1
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What is Electron?
What is Polymer?
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