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Electron vs React: What are the differences?

Introduction

This is a comparison between Electron and React, two popular technologies used for web development. Electron is a framework that allows developers to build desktop applications using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. On the other hand, React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces, mainly for web applications.

  1. Development Purpose: Electron is primarily used for developing desktop applications, whereas React is designed for creating user interfaces in web applications.

  2. Platform: Electron allows developers to build applications that can run on multiple operating systems such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. React, on the other hand, is a library that focuses on creating web interfaces that can run in web browsers.

  3. Rendering: Electron uses Chromium as its rendering engine, which is the same engine used by Google Chrome. This allows Electron applications to have powerful rendering capabilities. React uses its own virtual DOM (document object model) implementation for efficient updating and rendering of user interfaces.

  4. Single-page vs Multi-page: React is commonly used for building single-page applications where the content is dynamically updated without refreshing the entire page. Electron, however, is used for building multi-page applications, where multiple windows or screens are involved.

  5. Deployment: Electron applications need to be bundled and distributed as standalone executables for each target operating system. React applications, on the other hand, are typically deployed as static files on a web server and accessed through web browsers.

  6. Performance: Electron applications are known to consume more system resources compared to React applications, as Electron runs a separate instance of Chromium for each application window. React, being a lightweight library, provides faster rendering and updates in web applications.

In summary, Electron is utilized for developing desktop applications that can run on multiple operating systems, leveraging the power of Chromium for rendering. React, on the other hand, is a JavaScript library primarily used for building user interfaces in web applications, providing efficient updating and rendering through its virtual DOM implementation.

Advice on Electron and React
Needs advice
on
AngularJSAngularJSReactReact
and
Vue.jsVue.js

What is the best MVC stack to build mobile-friendly, light-weight, and fast single-page application with Spring Boot as back-end (Java)? Is Bootstrap still required to front-end layer these days?

The idea is to host on-premise initially with the potential to move to the cloud. Which combo would have minimal developer ramp-up time and low long-term maintenance costs (BAU support)?

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Replies (3)
Carolyne Stopa
Full Stack Developer at Contabilizei · | 10 upvotes · 557K views
Recommends
on
Vue.jsVue.js

React might be a good option if you're considering a mobile app for the future, because of react native. Although, Vue.js has the easiest learning curve and offers a better developer ramp-up time. Vue.js is great to build SPAs, very clean and organized and you won't have a lot of long-term maintenance problems (like AngularJS, for example). Bootstrap can still be used, but with flexbox there's no need anymore.

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Chaitanya Chunduri
Recommends
on
ReactReact

I recommend React because of less memory occupant compare to Angular, but this will depend on your organisation flexibility. When you use React you need to import different libraries as per your need. On the other side angular is a complete framework.

Performance-wise I vote for react js as it loads up quickly and lighter on the mobile. You can make good PWA with SSR as well.

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Recommends
on
ReactReact

If you are new to all three react will be a good choice considering, react-native will be useful if you want to build cross platform mobile application today or tomorrow. If you are talking about bootstrap styling framework than it's a choice you can style ur components by ur self or use bootstrap 4.0 framework. The complete stack mentioned above is platform agnostic u can run it anywhere you want be it cloud or on-premise.

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Needs advice
on
Vue.jsVue.jsMoment.jsMoment.js
and
ReactReact

Simple datepickers are cumbersome. For such a simple data input, I feel like it takes far too much effort. Ideally, the native input[type="date"] would just work like it does on FF and Chrome, but Safari and Edge don't handle it properly. So I'm left either having a diverging experience based on the browser or I need to choose a library to implement a datepicker since users aren't good at inputing formatted strings.

For React alone there are tons of examples to use https://reactjsexample.com/tag/date/. And then of course there's the bootstrap datepicker (https://bootstrap-datepicker.readthedocs.io/en/latest/), jQueryUI calendar picker, https://github.com/flatpickr/flatpickr, and many more.

How do you recommend going about handling date and time inputs? And then there's always moment.js, but I've observed some users getting stuck when presented with a blank text field. I'm curious to hear what's worked well for people...

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Replies (1)
Recommends
on
ReactReact

In my view, the upside of React is you're likely to find more existing, robust design systems (e.g. sets of components containing anything from buttons to datepickers) in the React ecosystem than Vue. UI frameworks aside, momentjs comes in when you want operate on the date(times) you get back from whatever datepicker you choose (e.g. date formatting, date match).

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Needs advice
on
ReactReact
and
Vue.jsVue.js

I find using Vue.js to be easier (more concise / less boilerplate) and more intuitive than writing React. However, there are a lot more readily available React components that I can just plug into my projects. I'm debating whether to use Vue.js or React for an upcoming project that I'm going to use to help teach a friend how to build an interactive frontend. Which would you recommend I use?

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Replies (16)
Johnny Bell
Recommends
on
ReactReact

I've used both Vue.js and React and I would stick with React. I know that Vue.js seems easier to write and its much faster to pick up however as you mentioned above React has way more ready made components you can just plugin, and the community for React is very big.

It might be a bit more of a steep learning curve for your friend to learn React over Vue.js but I think in the long run its the better option.

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Thomas LEVEIL
Recommends
on
Vue.jsVue.js

I chose to use Vue.js a few years ago mainly for the easy learning curve. I have no experience with React, so I won't make any comparison here. Regarding available components, I never felt locked in because of Vue when looking for components. It happens that a component I wish to use is not available as a Vue component (and nobody published any Vue wrapper for it), but in such cases I was able to quickly hack a Vue wrapper component. In the end I don't think a decision to choose one framework over another should be made solely because of the number of components available. (And not all components in either framework is maintained, bug free, documented or easy to use)

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Recommends
on
ReactReact

I would also go with React. The learning curve can be a little more difficult but as soon as you got the concepts it's really easy to create things. As everybody has mentioned the React community is huge and it keeps growing, anything you may need for your project there are super high probabilities that you will find it.

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Oguzhan Cetin
Senior Developer at Melantis · | 5 upvotes · 340.6K views
Recommends
on
ReactReact

React is great, Vue.js is also great. But I'm personally using React, because React is changing the way I look at how JavaScript should be. This is a really big plus for me. Vue is good, but it's just another alternative. Also, too many big companies are using React, that means you can trust it for big projects.

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Ben Shichman
Recommends
on
ReactReact

I'd have to concur that I'd advise React. In addition to the reasons mentioned, the developer pool is significantly larger (and also slightly more expensive) for React. In time, engineering costs will even out as more and more teams adopt it. The community support is fantastic, and the available components significant.

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Michael R.
Full-Stack Web Developer at STHCoders · | 3 upvotes · 339.5K views
Recommends
on
ReactReact

Anything that interacts with the Internet, websites, applications, etc., while it may be more complex to build, will be easier to maintain in the long run. React offers more flexibility, a much larger support base for knowledge and opinion, and is just as stable asVue.

To make the best comparison in my opinion, think of React as the Android OS and Vue more like iOS. While Vue may be advantageous in some cases, it is limited by constricting parameters. On the other hand, while React may be more complex and incorporate more open-source/third-party constructs, it is supported by over 50,000 npm packages and allows for the use of JSX. Which I might add, once learned, becomes second nature to employ and offers more flexibility.

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Recommends
on
Vue.jsVue.js
at

Both have their pro's and con's; however to agree what has been mentioned here before; Using Vue.js will be easier as it's learning curve isn't steep; plus learning Vue.js will teach you fundamentals which (in a sense) can be applied to React as well. Community support for React is indeed very big, but Vue.js is also still growing. Component wise, I wouldn't worry to much about that, writing your own components is also a good tool for learning a language.

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Recommends
on
Vue.jsVue.js

Would start with Vue especially if you want to progress more quickly and don't want/need to spend time learning React just for the sake of it. You can always pick up React later if necessary. I would caution about using "more readily available React components" just because they exist.

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Mark Scott
Personal Development at Mark Scott · | 3 upvotes · 341K views
Recommends
on
Vue.jsVue.js

Having developed in both Vue.js and React, I agree with your assessment of Vue. It does feel light and easier to understand and therefore learn. Seeing that Vue has some genetic roots with React, I would say start your friend out on Vue. If they need to learn React later, that should give them a good foundation. If you have a Pluralsight subscription, look for my course on Vue.js and feel free to use the demo project as a starting point.

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Rajeev Borborah
Vice President Technology at WebMD · | 1 upvotes · 339.4K views
Recommends
on
Vue.jsVue.js

We did a comparison between React, Vue and Angular and while found each capable of supporting our needs, we ended up using VueJS because of its ease of use, the ability to use templates, large and growing community and good documentation. After developing on it for a around 4 months we re-evaluated and agreed that we had made the right choice and continue to migrate our products/platform to it.

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Recommends
on
ReactReact

It is hard to say which is good. I've used both. Vue is easier. But I feel more comfortable with React. That is why I chose React.

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Recommends
on
Vue.jsVue.js

VueJS hands down. Which components do you need? Have a look at Vuetify, mature project, plenty of components ready to plug and play. If on the other side you need more customization, have a look at tailwindcss. VueJS is much cleaner and IMO will overtake React soon. It's simply a better React.

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Recommends
on
ReactReact

Virtual dom and JSX. Vue is just a baby to the race. React has it's mobile platform version as react native . so it would be easy for you and you wont reinvent the wheel again for mobile apps.

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Recommends
on
ReactReact

It all depends. Vue.js is smaller, and from what I saw (benchmarks) faster. It's also slightly more intuitive and easier to grasp. React is more popular, and the adoption rate is much higher.

Again, it all depends.

If I may, my personal choice would perhaps be either React or Svelte.

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Recommends
on
ReactReactVue.jsVue.js

I would recommend both of them since Vue is a UI library and helps you to design beautiful website while react allows you to handle backend problems like comment management and onspot reloading more efficiently also react includes useState and react is a framework while vue is a library

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S Milliken
Recommends
on
Vue.jsVue.js

As others have stated there are more canned components available for React, but your observation about it's complexity is an important one. There are architectural aspects of Vue.js that lead to cleaner more concise solutions. As React apps get bigger they become a little unwieldy. Depending on your requirements you need to weigh those competing concerns. Our team is using React, but I am beginning to question that choice as time goes on. Another consideration is that Vue.js is becoming more mature as we speak. Also as others join the project, react developers should be productive in Vue.js within days. Just my 2 cents...

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Decisions about Electron and React
Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 10 upvotes · 610.7K views

It was easier to find people who've worked on React than Vue. Angular did not have this problem, but seemed way too bloated compared to React. Angular also brings in restrictions working within their MVC framework. React on the other hand only handles the view/rendering part and rest of the control is left to the developers. React has a very active community, support and has lots of ready-to-use plugins/libraries available.

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José Oberto
Head of Engineering & Development at Chiper · | 14 upvotes · 530.5K views

It is a very versatile library that provides great development speed. Although, with a bad organization, maintaining projects can be a disaster. With a good architecture, this does not happen.

Angular is obviously powerful and robust. I do not rule it out for any future application, in fact with the arrival of micro frontends and cross-functional teams I think it could be useful. However, if I have to build a stack from scratch again, I'm left with react.

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Md.Riad Hasan Sarker
Javascript

one language can do simply everything(Development).

--Web Development, App Development, Desktop Development.

  1. You may learn java,kotlin for android development. 2.Swift or objective c for ios development. 3.php,python, or anything else for Web development including javascript.
  2. For desktop development you may learn c# or something like this.
  3. And JavaScript is playing a crucial part in entire data science workflow etc etc

Let's Come to the point ..

There are React,Vue,Anguar or node etc for Web Development. There is React Native for Android/ios development. Electron for Desktop development. All those technologies are based on javascript.

Your single programming language knowledge makes you boom...

Are you going to be love Javascript? it obviously makes you crazy than your thinking!!

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Valeriy Bykanov
Founder, CEO at X1 Group · | 4 upvotes · 399.6K views

Working on a new SaaS web/mobile app and ended up with React as our choice of Frontend JavaScript framework for SPA web version with React Native for iOS, Android, Windows clients.

The key takeaways:

  • Both frameworks can do the job quite well for us. This might be true for the majority of utility web apps being built out there as well, so there was no "wrong" decision here.

  • Vue is often cited as easier to learn and code on. But only in case your engineers never worked with either Vue or React and start learning them from scratch. In our case, we knew we'll be hiring engineers who already have experience in the framework we'll select - so it was not a big argument for Vue.

  • We're building our engineering team in Ukraine and realised we have 3(!) times more engineers with React experience on the market than having Vue experience.

  • Mobile - React Native, despite being a different framework, still shares a lot with React and it's just easier for React developers to start using React Native in days.

The strongest points for our decision:

  • React community is larger, means more/faster answers to your questions and existing components.

  • Way more experienced React engineers on the market.

  • React + React Native is a great combo if you're building web and mobile clients of the same app.

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John Clifford de Vera
Software Engineer at CircleYY · | 21 upvotes · 399.5K views

I used React not just because it is more popular than Angular. But the declarative and composition it gives out of the box is fascinating and React.js is just a very small UI library and you can build anything on top of it.

Composing components is the strongest asset of React for me as it can breakdown your application into smaller pieces which makes it easy to reuse and scale.

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Máté Homolya
Senior developer at Self-employed · | 11 upvotes · 271.2K views
Migrated
from
ReactReact
to
SvelteSvelte

Svelte is everything a developer could ever want for flexible, scalable frontend development. I feel like React has reached a maturity level where there needs to be new syntactic sugar added (I'm looking at you, hooks!). I love how Svelte sets out to rebuild a new language to write interfaces in from the ground up.

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Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 23 upvotes · 4.7M views

Our whole Vue.js frontend stack (incl. SSR) consists of the following tools:

  • Nuxt.js consisting of Vue CLI, Vue Router, vuex, Webpack and Sass (Bundler for HTML5, CSS 3), Babel (Transpiler for JavaScript),
  • Vue Styleguidist as our style guide and pool of developed Vue.js components
  • Vuetify as Material Component Framework (for fast app development)
  • TypeScript as programming language
  • Apollo / GraphQL (incl. GraphiQL) for data access layer (https://apollo.vuejs.org/)
  • ESLint, TSLint and Prettier for coding style and code analyzes
  • Jest as testing framework
  • Google Fonts and Font Awesome for typography and icon toolkit
  • NativeScript-Vue for mobile development

The main reason we have chosen Vue.js over React and AngularJS is related to the following artifacts:

  • Empowered HTML. Vue.js has many similar approaches with Angular. This helps to optimize HTML blocks handling with the use of different components.
  • Detailed documentation. Vue.js has very good documentation which can fasten learning curve for developers.
  • Adaptability. It provides a rapid switching period from other frameworks. It has similarities with Angular and React in terms of design and architecture.
  • Awesome integration. Vue.js can be used for both building single-page applications and more difficult web interfaces of apps. Smaller interactive parts can be easily integrated into the existing infrastructure with no negative effect on the entire system.
  • Large scaling. Vue.js can help to develop pretty large reusable templates.
  • Tiny size. Vue.js weights around 20KB keeping its speed and flexibility. It allows reaching much better performance in comparison to other frameworks.
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Malek Boubakri
Web developer at Quicktext · | 0 upvote · 201.6K views

The project is a web gadget previously made using vanilla script and JQuery, It is a part of the "Quicktext" platform and offers an in-app live & customizable messaging widget. We made that remake with React eco-system and Typescript and we're so far happy with results. We gained tons of TS features, React scaling & re-usabilities capabilities and much more!

What do you think?

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Manatsawin Hanmongkolchai
Chose
jQueryjQuery
over
ReactReact
in

When I started TipMe, I thought about using React frontend. At the end, plain, simple jQuery won.

I had to build this iteration of the site fast and by using jQuery I could keep using Django as a full stack development tool. One important point is Django form (combined with Django Bootstrap3) means that I don't have to reinvent form rendering again, which will be the case with React.

Over time, more interactivity seeped into the site and React components start making its way into the codebase.

I now wish the site is built using React so that I could add more user friendly interfaces easier (no more fuddling with server states) but I would still say jQuery helped me get past those early days.

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Jonas Stendahl

React has by far and away been our most important library choice throughout the history of Sellpy. It is a library that offers great flexibility supported by a really strong core. The React team is doing incredible work bringing quality features to the core project and tons of quality third party libraries fill in the gaps.

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Pros of Electron
Pros of React
  • 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
  • 827
    Components
  • 671
    Virtual dom
  • 578
    Performance
  • 506
    Simplicity
  • 442
    Composable
  • 185
    Data flow
  • 166
    Declarative
  • 127
    Isn't an mvc framework
  • 119
    Reactive updates
  • 115
    Explicit app state
  • 49
    JSX
  • 29
    Learn once, write everywhere
  • 22
    Easy to Use
  • 21
    Uni-directional data flow
  • 17
    Works great with Flux Architecture
  • 11
    Great perfomance
  • 10
    Javascript
  • 9
    Built by Facebook
  • 8
    TypeScript support
  • 6
    Server Side Rendering
  • 6
    Speed
  • 5
    Feels like the 90s
  • 5
    Excellent Documentation
  • 5
    Props
  • 5
    Functional
  • 5
    Easy as Lego
  • 5
    Closer to standard JavaScript and HTML than others
  • 5
    Cross-platform
  • 5
    Easy to start
  • 5
    Hooks
  • 5
    Awesome
  • 5
    Scalable
  • 4
    Super easy
  • 4
    Allows creating single page applications
  • 4
    Server side views
  • 4
    Sdfsdfsdf
  • 4
    Start simple
  • 4
    Strong Community
  • 4
    Fancy third party tools
  • 4
    Scales super well
  • 3
    Has arrow functions
  • 3
    Beautiful and Neat Component Management
  • 3
    Just the View of MVC
  • 3
    Simple, easy to reason about and makes you productive
  • 3
    Fast evolving
  • 3
    SSR
  • 3
    Great migration pathway for older systems
  • 3
    Rich ecosystem
  • 3
    Simple
  • 3
    Has functional components
  • 3
    Every decision architecture wise makes sense
  • 3
    Very gentle learning curve
  • 2
    Split your UI into components with one true state
  • 2
    Recharts
  • 2
    Permissively-licensed
  • 2
    Fragments
  • 2
    Sharable
  • 2
    Image upload
  • 2
    HTML-like
  • 1
    React hooks
  • 1
    Datatables

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Cons of Electron
Cons of React
  • 18
    Uses a lot of memory
  • 8
    User experience never as good as a native app
  • 4
    No proper documentation
  • 4
    Does not native
  • 1
    Each app needs to install a new chromium + nodejs
  • 1
    Wrong reference for dom inspection
  • 40
    Requires discipline to keep architecture organized
  • 29
    No predefined way to structure your app
  • 28
    Need to be familiar with lots of third party packages
  • 13
    JSX
  • 10
    Not enterprise friendly
  • 6
    One-way binding only
  • 3
    State consistency with backend neglected
  • 3
    Bad Documentation
  • 2
    Error boundary is needed
  • 2
    Paradigms change too fast

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- No public GitHub repository available -

What is 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.

What is React?

Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.

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What are some alternatives to Electron and React?
Photon
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.
React Native Desktop
Build OS X desktop apps using React Native.
React Native
React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.
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.
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.
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