Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Electron vs winjs: What are the differences?
What is 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.
What is winjs? A UI toolkit for modern browsers, by Microsoft. WinJS is a set of JavaScript toolkits that allow developers to build applications using HTML/JS/CSS technology forged with the following principles in mind: 1. Provide developers with a distinctive set of UI controls with high polish and performance with fundamental support for touch, mouse, keyboard and accessibility 2. Provide developers with a cohesive set of components and utilities to build the scaffolding and infrastructure of their applications'.
Electron and winjs are primarily classified as "Cross-Platform Desktop Development" and "Javascript UI Libraries" tools respectively.
Electron and winjs are both open source tools. Electron with 74.9K GitHub stars and 9.81K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than winjs with 4.07K GitHub stars and 504 GitHub forks.
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 winjs
- Developed by Microsoft1
- Aa0
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
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 winjs
- Small community1