Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to The Hanselminutes Podcast - Creating cross-platform Electron apps with Jessica Lord

Is Electron "just Chrome in a frame" or is it so much more?

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. The Hanselminutes Podcast - Creating cross-platform Electron apps with Jessica Lord launched in 2016; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

1. 1
   Electron 1.0▲647

   Build cross platform desktop apps

   2016 · electronjs.org · its alternatives →

2. 2TB
   Task-Based Electron Web Browser▲148

   2016 · alloy.simoncaminada.ch · its alternatives →

3. 3DL
   DeskGap – Like Electron, but uses the system webview▲318

   2019 · deskgap.com · its alternatives →

4. 4
   Electron App Store▲82

   A cross platform, open source app store for Electron.js apps

   2021 · its alternatives →

5. 5XW
   Xel, widget toolkit for native-like Electron apps▲38

   2017 · xel-toolkit.org · its alternatives →

6. 6
   ToDesktop 2.0▲378

   All in one platform for building and releasing desktop apps

   2020 · its alternatives →

7. 7WP
   We Put Chromium on a Unikernel (OSS Apache 2.0)▲132

   We’ve been building infrastructure to spin up browsers for AI agents. Originally, we built[0] it as a pool of warm Docker containers running Chromium, exposing: - Chrome DevTools Protocol (for Playwright/Puppeteer) - noVNC (for live view) We’ve been following the unikernel space for a while, so we decided to see if we could get our image on one. We went with Unikraft Cloud[1]. Here’s how it did: - Boot-up time: 10–20ms (vs. ~5s for Docker containers) - Near 0 CPU/memory consumption when idle - Still ~8GB RAM when active (headful Chromium) Potential use cases: - Standby mode during…

   2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

8. 8DA
   Doogie – A Chromium-Based Browser with Tree-Style Pages▲264

   2017 · cretz.github.io · its alternatives →

9. 9
   Electron.NET▲84

   Build cross platform desktop apps with .NET Core

   2017 · its alternatives →

10. 10EE
    Electrico – Electron Without Node and Chrome▲214

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

11. 11CL
    Chromely – Lightweight Alternative to Electron for .NET and .NET Core▲143

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

12. 12NA
    Native apps for the browser▲152

    2013 · arc.io · its alternatives →

13. 13
    Backbeam▲93

    Build web and mobile apps in half the time.

    2014 · its alternatives →

14. 14YD
    YouTube-DL GUI Powered by Electron▲142

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

15. 15EA
    EXT – an easy way to build cross-platform desktop software▲63

    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 →

16. 16MD
    Mongo DB management and GUI, built using Electron▲88

    2015 · mongotron.io · its alternatives →

17. 17
    NW.js▲77

    A new way of writing desktop apps with Web technologies

    2015 · its alternatives →

18. 18OS
    Open-source app to turn headless Chrome into a normal browser▲64

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

19. 19VM
    VoxLords – My latest WebGL Chrome Experiment▲32

    2015 · chromeexperiments.com · its alternatives →

20. 20EW
    Electron Webpack Dashboard▲28

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

21. 21SW
    Simple wrapper for Chrome's built-in local LLM (Gemini Nano)▲33

    Chrome now includes a native on-device LLM (Gemini Nano) starting in version 138. I've been building with it since it was in origin trials, it's powerful but the official Prompt API is still a bit awkward: - Enforces sessions even for basic usage - Requires user-triggered downloads - Lacks type safety or structured error handling So I open-sourced a small TypeScript wrapper I originally built for other projects to smooth over the rough edges: github: https://github.com/kstonekuan/simple-chromium-ai npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/simple-chromium-ai…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

22. 22KE
    Kotlin/Elm/Electron Tech Demo▲7

    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 →

23. 23CL
    Chromely – Lightweight Alternative to Electron for .NET and .NET Core▲16

    This is introducing Chromely. Chromely is a lightweight .NET/.NET Core HTML5 Chromium desktop framework alternative to Electron.NET, Electron for .NET/.NET Core developers. Chromely builds HTML5 desktops without WinForms or WPF. Chromely is based on CEF's Xilium.CefGlue and CefSharp using thin Windows and Linux native GUI API as chromium hosts. With Chromely, you can build SPA's HTML5 desktop apps- using Angular, React, Vue or similar - without Node/NPM. For more info please go to - https://github.com/mattkol/Chromely

    2018 · its alternatives →

24. 24MA
    Markdownify - A minimal Markdown editor desktop app based on Electron▲6

    2016 · amitmerchant.com · its alternatives →

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 →