# Electron 203 Hacker News commenters recommended Electron and 456 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. **Verdict:** Recommended for shipping one web-based desktop app across Windows, macOS and Linux quickly and consistently, but critics widely agree it bloats memory and download size. ## Why people recommend it - One codebase for every platform (12 comments): "The browsers, on the other hand, use the same language, same rendering model, same layout system, and same accessibility layer everywhere, which is a massive abstraction win." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867344)) "Maintaining three separate UI stacks (WinUI, SwiftUI, GTK/Qt) is dramatically more expensive and slower to iterate on than a single web-based UI with shared logic" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867451)) "Web technologies like Electron aren’t optimal, but they’re the best way to avoid being stuck to a hardware/software platform." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47654807)) - Much faster development (7 comments): "it's doubtful those apps would have been created in the first place if it wasn't for the speedup of development allowed by ElectronJS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48921129)) "If they can save effort with Electron and put that effort into things their research says users care about more, everyone wins." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46868527)) "If they delegate that responsibility to Google via Electron, they can focus on features/bug fixes that move the needle." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49584270)) - Proven good enough in major apps (5 comments): "Just use Electron. Yes, performance blahblah, but thousands of Electron apps work on millions of machines just fine." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49397333)) "Electron is a sane choice and good enough for Figma, Slack, Notion, leading apps in their respective categories." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48814391)) "Customers simply don't care. I don't recall a single complain about RAM or disk usage of my Electron-based app" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862945)) - Bundled Chromium avoids webview bugs (3 comments): "The value of packaging the chrome browser is you don't need to suddenly track down 4+ different webview rendering bugs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125760)) "a lot of the little things "feel right" because the UI is essentially a Chromium-rendered web page" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48141861)) "bundling yhe browser is stability. being exposed to random webviews makes instability inevitible" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48338902)) ## What people warn about - Heavy RAM and CPU usage (7 comments): "it becomes quite a big executable eating a huge amount of ram even for low functionality and often slow" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46083161)) "A software version of that might be making apps with Electron. It doesn't matter how much cpu and ram and disk and general mass of tech stack it takes to make some trivial app." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48040557)) "Electron is atrocious, if you asked me. Modern computers are wasting staggering amounts of CPU cycles and memory on inefficient, bloated software stacks." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50225181)) - Huge bundled browser for simple apps (5 comments): "copy of chromium is bundled with every app that renders webform with text field and button and nothing else" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48627645)) "Electron is way bigger than an app needs to be, of course, but those giant apps that you hate, 250MB just for a health tracker? That's not electron being the problem." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49645172)) "Why can't Codex write, or at least translate, your application to native code instead of using a multi-hundred-mb browser wrapper to display text?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46860334)) - Slow, bloated software (4 comments): "it becomes quite a big executable eating a huge amount of ram even for low functionality and often slow" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46083161)) "Electron is atrocious, if you asked me. Modern computers are wasting staggering amounts of CPU cycles and memory on inefficient, bloated software stacks." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50225181)) "If companies cared about bloat and performance you wouldn't see web apps with dozens of dependencies, cross platform mobile apps and Electron apps." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389451)) - Loses native OS look and feel (2 comments): "There's a lot of nice little things like that in desktop OSes that we completely lose with everyone shifting to using electron" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901760)) "Electron apps are incongruent to native OS apps. Electron apps look the same on each platform therefore they are consistent." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47130738)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Tauri](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tauri.md): 152 recommend - [Deno Desktop](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deno-desktop.md): 30 recommend - [Wails](https://hackerapproved.com/p/wails.md): 25 recommend - [Electrobun](https://hackerapproved.com/p/electrobun.md): 17 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Electron", https://hackerapproved.com/p/electron/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).