Why We Built GetApps on Tauri Instead of Electron

GetApps Cafe — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 03:12:14 +0000

Every time I mention we're shipping 55+ desktop apps and none of them use Electron, I get the same reaction. Half disbelief, half "okay but why though." So here's the actual technical reasoning, not the marketing version.

This isn't an Electron hate post. Electron is a genuinely impressive piece of engineering and it powers half the apps on your dock right now. It just wasn't the right tool for what we're building.

The problem we were solving

GetApps bundles dozens of small, focused utility apps. Screenshot tools, file converters, PDF editors, disk analyzers, that kind of thing. If each one shipped its own Chromium runtime, a user installing even five or six apps would be carrying around 500MB+ of duplicated browser engine before writing a single byte of their own data.

Multiply that by 55 apps and you get a platform that eats disk space and RAM just existing in the background. For a subscription bundle where the whole pitch is "install as many as you want," that math doesn't work.

Why Electron doesn't fit that math

Electron bundles a full Chromium instance and a Node.js runtime into every single app. A "Hello World" Electron app routinely lands at 100-150MB before you add any real functionality, and idle memory usage sits in the 100-200MB range per running app just to keep the renderer and main process alive.

That's fine if you're building one app that's the main thing on someone's machine, like Slack or VS Code. It's a very different equation when you're asking someone to have 10-15 of your apps installed simultaneously.

There's also the update story. Electron apps ship and patch their own Chromium build, which means you're on the hook for Chromium security patches on your own release schedule, not the OS vendor's.

What Tauri does differently

Tauri doesn't bundle a browser. It uses the operating system's native WebView, WKWebView on macOS and WebView2 (Edge/Chromium under the hood) on Windows. The rendering engine is already sitting on the user's machine because the OS ships it, so your app doesn't have to carry it.

That single decision is why a comparable Tauri app ships at 3-10MB instead of 100-150MB, and idle memory typically sits in the 30-60MB range instead of 100-200MB. We're not hand-waving these numbers, they show up consistently across our own builds once we account for the actual UI complexity, not toy examples.

Pixpresso, one of our free-tier apps for viewing and processing images, is a good real-world case of what that footprint means in practice. It opens instantly and sits at a fraction of the idle memory a Chromium-based equivalent would use, simply because there's no bundled browser doing nothing while the app waits for input.

Security patching for the WebView itself becomes the OS vendor's job too. When Apple or Microsoft patches a WebKit or Chromium CVE, every Tauri app on that machine benefits automatically on the next OS update, without us shipping anything.

The bigger architectural shift: Rust owns computation

This is the part that doesn't get talked about enough. Tauri isn't just "Electron but smaller," it changes where your actual logic lives.

In Electron, your app logic is JavaScript running in Node, calling out to native modules when you need real performance. In Tauri, the backend is Rust. Every CPU-heavy operation, image processing, PDF parsing, file compression, disk scanning, statistical calculations, all of it runs as compiled native code instead of interpreted JS.

For a bundle of utility apps where half the value proposition is "does the actual work fast," this matters more than the bundle size does. Our internal rule is "Rust owns computation, Vue is chrome." The frontend framework is just there to draw UI and forward user intent. It never touches the CPU-heavy path.

TripRoute, one of our video apps, is a good example from our own catalog. It renders and encodes video entirely through a Rust pipeline, the Vue layer just shows progress and lets you scrub the timeline. The UI thread stays free because it was never doing the heavy lifting to begin with.

Cross-platform without an asterisk

Windows parity was non-negotiable for us from day one. A huge chunk of the utility app market treats Windows as an afterthought, especially indie Mac devs leaning on Apple-only frameworks.

Tauri compiles to a real native binary on both platforms from the same Rust core, and WebView2 ships with Windows 10/11 by default, so we're not asking users to install anything extra. When we do lean on a platform-accelerated API, like on-device speech transcription on macOS 26, we treat it as an accelerated path with a Rust-based fallback (whisper.cpp, in that case) for Windows, never as a Mac-exclusive feature that quietly breaks our cross-platform promise.

What we gave up

To be fair about the tradeoffs: Tauri's ecosystem is younger than Electron's. Fewer Stack Overflow answers, fewer battle-tested plugins, and the IPC bridge between Rust and the frontend takes more upfront design than just requiring a Node module.

We also inherit whatever quirks exist in WebView2 on older Windows builds, since we're not carrying our own Chromium to paper over inconsistencies. In practice this has been a manageable cost, but it's a real one and anyone evaluating Tauri should budget time for it.

The actual verdict

If you're building one app and it's the main thing users open all day, Electron's ecosystem maturity is a legitimate reason to pick it. If you're building a platform where install footprint, idle memory, and raw compute performance compound across dozens of apps running on the same machine, that math flips hard in Tauri's favor.

For us, shipping 55+ apps that people are meant to install freely without their laptop turning into a space heater, there wasn't really a contest once we ran the numbers.

DEV Community: GetApps Cafe