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Electron vs React Native Desktop: 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, React Native Desktop is detailed as "React Native for OS X". Build OS X desktop apps using React Native.
Electron and React Native Desktop belong to "Cross-Platform Desktop Development" category of the tech stack.
Electron and React Native Desktop are both open source tools. Electron with 74.4K GitHub stars and 9.72K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than React Native Desktop with 11.1K GitHub stars and 479 GitHub forks.
Pros of Electron
- Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications66
- Open source51
- Great looking apps such as Slack and Visual Studio Code13
- Because it's cross platform7
- Use Node.js in the Main Process3
Pros of React Native Desktop
- Pretty awesome3
- Is native app2
- Does not include any browser2
- Memory usage reduced2
- Quickly convert react.js web app to desktop app1
- Open source1
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Cons of Electron
- Uses a lot of memory18
- 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 React Native Desktop
- Memory usage reduced0