AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Exo – the electron app that’s helping to build itself
Hi HN folks! I’m the creator of Exo and wanted to share my progress with the HN community. Exo is an electron app that uses a chat interface and open Ai to write code directly to your file system/repos. Exo is a work in progress - its very new and has many rough edges. I was hoping to get some early feedback from HN folks and hopefully some early users. Once you create an account the universal electron installer link is on the dashboard. Here is a quick explainer video: https://www.loom.com/share/5f34499ccfb54bfdae32ee50f454b365 Exo started as a thin wrapper around…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Exo – the electron app that’s helping to build itself launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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- 2EA
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 →
- 3
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 →
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A Lightweight Electron App Container. Contribute to thomastschurtschenthaler/electrico development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Windows 95 in an app. Runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows. - felixrieseberg/windows95
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
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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 →
- 8IR
Happy Holidays! Today I am delighted to announce the first release of H2O, version 0.9.0; this is a christmas gift from me. github.com/h...
2014 · blog.kazuhooku.com · its alternatives →
- 9
Hey HN, We’re Philip, Amby, and Declan, and we made “multiplayer virtual computers” that you can embed anywhere, including 3D spaces. We decided to build this because we noticed that embedding third-party apps and websites can be a nightmare due to incompatible platforms, security issues, and poor UX. Adding multiplayer functionality to these embeds makes this problem exponentially more difficult. On the backend, we’re spinning up a VM and running a resource-optimized fork of Chromium which we then stream to participants via WebRTC. Since we’re hosting the servers running the applications,…
2022 · threejs-example.hyperbeam.com · its alternatives →
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display.dev▲183Last week's post from Thariq "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML" went viral in X. He made a good point about HTML being the more expressive and human friendly alternative to markdown files. I completely buy in where he's coming from, I've been asking Claude Code to create me HTML files to better understand what we're planning and building together. What Thariq didn't address was the part of sharing and collaborating on these HTML artifacts (he proposed uploading to S3). While I've been heavy user of HTML artifacts to share quarterly plans, implementation specs, technical guides and…
May 2026 · display.dev · its alternatives →
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Is Electron "just Chrome in a frame" or is it so much more?
2016 · hanselminutes.com · its alternatives →
- 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 →
- 13EA
eno [1] - A modern plaintext language w/ libraries [2] for JavaScript, Python, Ruby & soon more! We migrated a big relational research database to a file-based solution - requirements were: - Super fast and easy editability for users - Highest performance for parsing/validating >10K documents on every user change. Our trials with YAML/TOML showed us that we wanted something both faster [3][4] and easier [4], something tailored for file-based content management ... and after months of research & development it's now publicly available (under MIT license) for everyone! Last but…
2018 · its alternatives →
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Desktop runtime for apps built on web technologies, using the system's own web browser engine - pojala/electrino
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Recently several AI labs have published experiments where they tried to get AI coding agents to complete large software projects. - Cursor attempted to make a browser from scratch: https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents - Anthropic attempted to make a C Compiler: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler I have been wondering if there are software packages that can be easily reproduced by taking the available test suites and tasking agents to work on projects until the existing test suites pass. After playing with this concept by having…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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:package: Easily write and read user settings in Electron apps - electron-userland/electron-json-storage
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17KE
Another HN Desktop client: https://github.com/spennihana/HackerDesktop Last weekend user westoncb posted[1] an app built in kotlin/swing[2]. A comment there mentioned that an electron app might be an interesting alternative, and here is the result of this last week's hackings. It uses the firebase API underneath and elm/electron to interact with kotlin via the spark-kotlin micro rest framework. The icns were made with Adobe Illustrator. The dmg unpacks to a whopping 250MB (since it packages the JRE in addition to all of the usual electron junk). video link:…
2017 · its alternatives →
- 18CW
ToDesktop is your end-to-end Electron partner — offering effortless deployment, robust security and seamless auto-updates.
2019 · todesktop.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Hi HN! I left AWS a few months ago and created CodinIT, a local, open-source AI app builder made with remix + Electron. The motivation: I tried one of the popular cloud-based AI app builders, but when I pulled down the app to run locally, it just didn’t work especially with the monthly costs needed to build something half decent without being limited. So I created CodinIT, an app builder that runs fully on your computer, making it easy to switch between CodinIT and coding tools like Cursor or Claude Code. Source code: https://github.com/codinit-dev/codinit-dev Download…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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- 21IB
Hey everyone! My name is Will. I’ve been leading engineering teams for over two decades. Also, first time HN user here! One of the common pains I’d encounter in nearly every product I managed was alerting end users to infrequent events like outages, global announcements, beta launches, planned maintenance, etc. We’d always need to deploy custom, one-off modals or other alerts and then have to remember to revert them later. It was always a time sink for a developer to put aside what they were working on to make this happen. This Is Not A Drill! is a simple-to-install JS SDK that makes it…
2024 · its alternatives →
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A unified digital workplace powered by native AI
2025 · community.exoplatform.com · its alternatives →
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2017 · xel-toolkit.org · its alternatives →
- 24
An 'alt+space' launcher for Windows, built with Electron - hainproject/hain
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →