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
- 2
A cross platform, open source app store for Electron.js apps
2021 · its alternatives →
- 3
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 →
- 4
- 5
ToDesktop 2.0▲380All in one platform for building and releasing desktop apps
2020 · todesktop.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Limitless▲90A productivity companion for Chrome
2013 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →
- 7
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 →
- 8TB
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 →
- 9
Showcase of web experiments written by creative coders
2015 · experiments.withgoogle.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Electron.NET▲84Build cross platform desktop apps with .NET Core
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
A Lightweight Electron App Container. Contribute to thomastschurtschenthaler/electrico development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
- 13
- 14
AlliHat▲96I think we all have a similar flow and pain with browsers and AI. Copy article, paste in Claude tab, come back to article, back to Claude, in circles we go. Anthropic has a Chrome extension, but my daily driver is Safari. So I made my own extension. It's not a clone as I've never used the Chrome version. One obvious change: the Chrome version I believe uses Chrome "request sidebar" thing. And Safari doesn't have that, so had to inject the sidebar right in the site html itself. There's been some fun things in here like figuring out the sidebar html/css sandboxing. Also there's an agent…
May 2026 · allihat.com · its alternatives →
- 15EA
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
2017 · xel-toolkit.org · its alternatives →
- 17
- 18
- 19
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 →
- 20
- 21
- 22KE
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
2018 · terrainformatica.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Chrome for Android is now 'almost entirely open-source'
2015 · chromium.org · its alternatives →
Also compare
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 →