Comparison
Ship five megabytes, or ship one known browser?
The verdict
For a new desktop app in 2026, start with Tauri 2. Installers land under 10 MB against 150 to 200 MB for Electron, idle memory runs 20 to 100 MB against 200 to 400 MB, and cold start is several times faster - because Tauri uses the webview already on the machine instead of shipping its own copy of Chromium. Choose Electron when you need one identical rendering engine on every operating system, when you depend on deep native integration that already has a battle-tested Electron package, or when the team is JavaScript-only and a Rust boundary would be a real tax on a real deadline. Those are not rare. VS Code, Slack, Discord, Figma, and 1Password all still ship Electron, and none of them are wrong.
The momentum is one-directional. GitHub data through 2026 shows Tauri repositories growing about 55 percent year over year while Electron's growth has flattened, and Tauri's plugin registry expanded from roughly 47 official and community plugins in January 2025 to over 120 by April 2026. Momentum is not maturity, though, and the gap between them is precisely what this comparison is about.
Tauri vs Electron on the dimensions that decide it
Published benchmarks vary widely because "an app" varies widely. The ranges below are the ones that reproduce across independent tests; a hello world sits at the bottom of each range and a real six-window application at the top.
| Dimension | Tauri 2 | Electron |
|---|---|---|
| Installer size | Roughly 3 to 10 MB for a real app; the minimum binary is under a megabyte. Nothing browser-shaped is in the package. | 80 to 200 MB, typically 150 to 200 MB once you have icons, a few dependencies, and code signing. |
| Idle memory | 20 to 100 MB depending on the platform webview and how many windows you open. | 200 to 400 MB. Every window is a Chromium renderer process on top of the main process. |
| Cold start | Fast, because the system webview is usually already resident. Benchmarks report roughly a quarter of Electron's launch time. | Slower. Chromium has to be initialized from disk on every launch. |
| Rendering engine | The OS webview: WebView2 on Windows, WKWebView on macOS, WebKitGTK on Linux. Three engines, three sets of quirks. | One pinned Chromium everywhere. What you test is byte-for-byte what every user runs. |
| Backend language | Rust. The JavaScript API covers filesystem, dialogs, notifications, shell, and HTTP without writing any, but custom native work is Rust. | Node.js in the main process. Every npm package that touches the filesystem or a native module is available immediately. |
| Ecosystem depth | Over 120 plugins and growing fast, but you will still hit a gap and have to write a command yourself. | A decade of packages for auto-update, native menus, tray behavior, printing, USB, serial, and every OS oddity you can name. |
| Security defaults | Deny by default. The capability system means the frontend can only call commands you explicitly permitted, per window. | Safe if configured: context isolation on, sandbox on, node integration off. Safe defaults now, but the failure mode is a full Node runtime in a renderer. |
| Update payload | Small. Users who update weekly are downloading megabytes, not a browser. | Large and frequent. Chromium's release cadence means security updates are a standing maintenance obligation. |
| Mobile targets | iOS and Android build targets landed in Tauri 2, so one codebase can reach desktop and mobile. | Desktop only. Mobile means a second framework and a second team. |
| Hiring and onboarding | Any web developer can build the UI. The Rust boundary concentrates risk on whoever owns the native layer. | Entirely JavaScript and TypeScript. Any web developer on the team can fix any part of the app. |
When each framework is the right call
Choose Tauri when
- Download size is a conversion metric. A 5 MB installer converts differently from a 180 MB one, especially for a utility someone is trying on a whim.
- The app runs in the background all day - a launcher, a clipboard tool, a sync client - where 300 MB of resident memory is a reason to uninstall.
- You want the security model to be restrictive by default rather than by review. Capabilities are declared per window and audited in one file.
- Someone on the team is comfortable in Rust, or the native surface is small enough that the built-in plugins cover it.
- You expect to ship a mobile build eventually and would rather not maintain two shells.
- Your UI is straightforward web content: forms, lists, tables, charts. Webview differences barely register on that kind of surface.
Choose Electron when
- You need one rendering engine everywhere. If your product is a design tool, a video editor, or anything leaning on bleeding-edge CSS, Canvas, or WebGL, three webviews is three bug reports.
- You depend on a native capability that already has a mature Electron package: printing, USB, serial, screen capture, system-wide hotkeys, deep OS menu integration.
- The team is JavaScript-only and the schedule has no room for anyone to learn Rust mid-project. This is the most common honest reason and it is a good one.
- You need Node.js in the app itself - spawning tooling, using an existing npm-based engine, or running the same server code the web product runs.
- Install size genuinely does not matter because the app is deployed by IT or bundled with hardware.
- You want auto-update, code signing, and notarization that thousands of teams have already debugged for you on all three platforms.
The webview tradeoff nobody puts on the landing page
Every number in Tauri's favor comes from the same decision: it does not ship a browser. That is also where its only serious risk lives. On Windows you get WebView2, which is Chromium and behaves the way you expect. On macOS you get WKWebView, and on Linux you get WebKitGTK, and those are Safari-family engines with a different release cadence, different CSS support, and on Linux a genuinely variable version depending on the distribution. A feature that works perfectly in your dev browser can be missing on a user's machine, and you will not find out from CI unless you test on all three.
In practice this is a non-issue for the majority of desktop apps, which are forms, lists, tables, and settings panels. It is a serious issue for anything visually ambitious. Before committing, take the two or three hardest rendering things your app does and prototype them in a WKWebView and a WebKitGTK window. That afternoon is the cheapest insurance available in this decision.
The Rust boundary is the second cost, and it is smaller than its reputation. Tauri's JavaScript API already covers filesystem access, dialogs, notifications, the clipboard, the shell, HTTP requests, and window management, so a large class of apps never opens a .rs file. The moment you need something outside that set you are writing a Rust command, and if nobody on the team can, that becomes a bottleneck on one person. Assess this honestly rather than optimistically: "we'll learn Rust as we go" is true for a side project and expensive on a deadline.
Electron's real cost is not memory, which most users have. It is maintenance. Chromium ships on a fast cadence, security fixes land continuously, and staying current means regular version bumps that each push another 150 MB update to every user. Teams that fall behind on Electron versions end up shipping a browser with known CVEs in it, which is a compliance conversation waiting to happen. Tauri inherits OS webview updates for free, which is a genuine operational advantage that gets far less attention than the file size.
One prediction worth stating plainly so it can be checked later: the size and memory gap is not going to close, because it is architectural rather than an optimization backlog. What can close is the ecosystem gap, and that is what the plugin growth numbers are measuring. If your blocker today is a missing plugin, re-check in six months rather than concluding the framework cannot do it.
Official documentation is at tauri.app and electronjs.org. Both have working migration guides, and both let you keep whatever frontend framework you already use.
Where this fits in a full stack
The desktop app stack guide assembles the rest of the build around either choice: frontend framework, local storage, auto-update, code signing, and crash reporting.
The UI inside the shell is an ordinary web app, so the frontend framework layer and React vs Svelte both apply unchanged - and bundle size matters more here than on the web, because it loads from disk on every launch.
If a command line tool would have done the job, the CLI tool stack guide is the cheaper build. More matchups are in the comparisons index.