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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Electrino, a featherweight API-compatible alternative to Electron

Desktop runtime for apps built on web technologies, using the system's own web browser engine - pojala/electrino

Electrino is a lightweight framework for building desktop applications as an alternative to Electron. It provides API compatibility with Electron while using fewer system resources. The tool is designed for developers… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Electrino, a featherweight API-compatible alternative to Electron launched in 2017; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Build cross platform desktop apps

    2016 · electronjs.org · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    A Lightweight Electron App Container. Contribute to thomastschurtschenthaler/electrico development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Build performant, native and cross-platform desktop applications with native Svelte + powerful CSS-like styling.🚀 - nodegui/svelte-nodegui

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    A year ago, my co-founder launched Desktop Docs here on HN. It's a Mac app we built with Electron that uses CLIP embeddings to search photos and videos locally with natural language. We got positive feedback from HN and our first paying customers, but the app was almost 1GB and clunky to use. TLDR; rebuilding in Rust was the right move. So we rewrote the app with Rust and Tauri and here are the results: - App size is 83% smaller: 1GB → 172MB - DMG Installer is 70% smaller: 232MB → 69.5MB - Indexing files is faster: A 38-minute video now indexes in ~3 minutes instead of 10-14 minutes -…

    2025 · desktopdocs.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    🌙 The minimal & fast library for functional user interfaces - kbrsh/moon

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Build Cross Platform HTML Desktop Apps on .NET using native GUI, HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, Owin, AspNetCore (MVC, RazorPages, Blazor) - chromelyapps/Chromely

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Windows 95 in an app. Runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows. - felixrieseberg/windows95

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8EA

    Hi HN! If you've ever tried to build a desktop app, you probably understand our frustrations with how challenging it is to build one and make it available on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Even with Electron, you still have to set up your own build pipelines, updating mechanisms, code-signing, deployments, and deal with cross-platform compatibility issues. We built EXT to make building cross-platform desktop software easier! Dog-fooding our own APIs, we ported 36 initial games and utilities to the EXT store (all free), and we've open-sourced all of them: https://github.com/extpkg If…

    2024 · ext.store · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    All in one platform for building and releasing desktop apps

    2020 · todesktop.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    A video and channel downloader that supports 110 websites, powered by Electron and youtube-dl - mayeaux/videodownloader

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hello HN! I'm the author of Ant, a JavaScript ecosystem built around a runtime with its own JavaScript engine. Ant also includes a package manager, the ants.land package registry, a platform for deploying and hosting applications, and Ant Desktop for building native desktop apps with web technologies, similar to Electron. The goal is for these pieces to work as one coherent platform while remaining compatible with the wider JavaScript ecosystem. It's still early, and I'd appreciate any feedback on the overall direction or what you'd like to see from an e2e alternative to the existing…

    Jul 2026 · antjs.org · its alternatives →

  12. 12TB

    A web browser for the power user. Forget the browser window full of unsorted, jammed tabs. Alloy is built up on Tasks, of which every has its own Tablist. You only see the relevant Tabs for your current Task.

    2016 · alloy.simoncaminada.ch · its alternatives →

  13. 13
  14. 14

    A little Python library for making simple Electron-like HTML/JS GUI apps - python-eel/Eel

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Your friendly JavaScript framework

    2018 · forum.vuejs.org · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Toolkit to build and launch Electron apps

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Create, run, package, and share experiments with Electron.

    2018 · medium.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    For a year or two I've been building a UI library with the aim of making desktop applications fun and easy to write. It is currently written in C/Ruby and uses a custom tree sitter grammar to describe templates. Features include: composable UI components, template directives, event and prop handling, slots, styles and automation capabilities baked in. One of the goals of the project is privileging easy to write custom components via a drawing API over providing a fixed set of components. At the time of this writing it should install on Windows, Mac, and Linux, but sometimes it is hard…

    2025 · codeberg.org · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Neutrino API provides a collection of general-purpose APIs that solve common but difficult problems encountered during software development

    2015 · neutrinoapi.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20
    nodegui▲195

    Build cross-platform desktop applications with JavaScript🚀

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Winrt APIs-node.js modules generator. Contribute to NodeRT/NodeRT development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hi HN. I built Payload to make file transfers easy for less-technical users who need large/fast transfers, so I have focused on auto-discovery, drag-and-drop, visually distinct device icons. It's using Tauri (an "Electron alternative" built on Rust) which keeps my binaries small and bundles to .msi, .dmg, .deb and .appimage. No CLI, iOS or Android support (yet). The network stack is a separate binary written in Go. It uses mDNS for local network discovery and TLS over TCP or Quic, with a public Ed25519 keypair for each device. The protocol is ad-hoc and symmetrical control stream using…

    2022 · payload.app · its alternatives →

  23. 23
    Tauri▲214

    An Electron alternative written in Rust

    2022 · tauri.app · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    A cross-platform build utility based on Lua

    2019 · xmake.io · its alternatives →

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