Instead of Electron: Tauri

Why Tauri is better

• Tauri apps do not bundle a browser engine. They use WebView2 on Windows, WKWebView on macOS and WebKitGTK on Linux, and a minimal app can be less than 600KB. Electron embeds Chromium and Node.js in every app.
• The backend is Rust, which brings memory and thread safety. Individual APIs can be switched on and off, and an isolation pattern stops untrusted scripts reaching the backend.
• Tauri undergoes a security audit for major and minor releases, covering upstream dependencies as well as its own code.
• Tauri 2, stable since October 2024, also targets iOS and Android, so one project can cover desktop and mobile. Electron is desktop only.
• Any frontend that compiles to HTML, CSS and JavaScript works, so an existing React, Vue or Svelte interface moves over largely unchanged.

When to keep Electron

Keep Electron when the app must look and behave the same on every OS, since it ships one known Chromium version, or when it relies on Node.js modules and native addons. Visual Studio Code, Slack and Discord run on it, and it is still the larger ecosystem. electron had 35,414,597 npm downloads in the month to early November 2026 against 12,667,449 for @tauri-apps/api.

Switching

The frontend usually moves with little change; the backend is a rewrite. Electron main-process code written for Node.js becomes Rust commands called through invoke(), or uses Tauri's official plugins for files, dialogs and updates. Renderer calls to ipcRenderer change to Tauri's invoke API, and packaging, code signing and auto-update are set up again.

Watch out

Because Tauri uses the system webview, rendering and web API support vary by platform and OS version. On macOS the webview only updates with the OS, so users on old macOS versions get old WebKit. You must test on every target platform. Backend work needs Rust, which many web teams do not know.