I started desktop application development back in 2018 for my final year project. That was when I discovered Electron. It was JavaScript, which I already knew, and it looked clean and nice. But there was an issue with it: performance.
A small app ran fine, but as it grew, you started having issues.
I was a student. My laptop had 4GB of RAM. Between my IDE, Node running underneath, and the already-open Chrome instance I was reading the Electron docs and StackOverflow off of, firing up a new Chromium instance was often more than it could bear. And that's not hyperbole. A bare Electron "Hello World" ships a full Chromium browser engine and a Node.js runtime. At idle, that baseline lands somewhere between 150MB and 250MB of RAM. Each BrowserWindow you open tacks on another 50 to 100MB.
On a 4GB machine, three Electron apps could push you into swap territory before you wrote a line of meaningful code. Meanwhile, a Go desktop app built with Wails compiles to maybe 5 to 15MB and idles at 10 to 30MB of RAM. A Rust app with egui? 5 to 20MB idle, binary under 10MB. No garbage collector, no V8, no Chromium compositor ticking in the background.
I didn't know any of this in 2018. I just knew my laptop hated Electron.
I've been prejudiced against it ever since. I still think it's cool. I'll just never use it if I have a choice.
The Tauri Alternative
So I looked into alternatives. The Xamarin Framework was popping off at the time. It had major Microsoft support and a lot of prebuilt libraries I could use. Xamarin.Forms apps shared UI code across platforms and connected to native components on each target. They idled around 30 to 80MB. Not great, but miles better than Electron.
The Mono runtime added overhead, though. And the tooling was heavily tied to Visual Studio, which I wasn't using at the time.
Then I found Tauri.
Tauri takes a fundamentally different approach: instead of bundling Chromium, it uses the system webview — Safari on macOS, WebView2 on Windows, webkit-gtk on Linux. Your frontend code runs in whatever browser the user already has installed. The backend is Rust.
The result: a typical Tauri app idles at 10 to 30MB of RAM. The binary is 5 to 15MB. Startup is near-instant.
Video Plucker: The Migration
Video Plucker started as an Electron app. It worked. It also idled at several hundred megabytes of RAM to render what is essentially a text field and a progress bar.
I rebuilt it with Tauri. The binary dropped by an order of magnitude and startup became instant.
The tradeoff is real: webview differences across platforms are your problem now, and the Rust side has a learning curve. For a tool this small, it was worth every hour.
When Electron Still Makes Sense
I'm not saying "never use Electron." If you're building a complex desktop app with deep OS integration, multiple windows, and a team that knows JavaScript inside and out — Electron is battle-tested and has a massive ecosystem.
But for small utilities, tools, and side projects? Tauri is hard to beat. The performance difference isn't just a number on a benchmark — it's the difference between an app that feels native and one that feels like a browser tab pretending to be an app.
Conclusion
Electron gave me my start in desktop development. I'm grateful for that. But Tauri gave me性能 performance I didn't know I was missing. If you're building something small and care about resource usage, give Tauri a look. Your users' RAM will thank you.