Akka vs Electron

Overview

Akka

Stacks1.2K

Followers1.0K

Votes88

Electron

Stacks11.6K

Followers10.0K

Votes148

Akka vs Electron: What are the differences?

Akka: Build powerful concurrent & distributed applications more easily. Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications on the JVM; Electron: Build cross platform desktop apps with web technologies. Formerly known as Atom Shell, made by GitHub. With Electron, creating a desktop application for your company or idea is easy. Initially developed for GitHub's Atom editor, Electron has since been used to create applications by companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Slack, and Docker. The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on io.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor.

Akka and Electron are primarily classified as "Concurrency Frameworks" and "Cross-Platform Desktop Development" tools respectively.

"Great concurrency model" is the primary reason why developers consider Akka over the competitors, whereas "Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications" was stated as the key factor in picking Electron.

Akka and Electron are both open source tools. It seems that Electron with 74.9K GitHub stars and 9.81K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Akka with 10.1K GitHub stars and 3.04K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Electron has a broader approval, being mentioned in 221 company stacks & 374 developers stacks; compared to Akka, which is listed in 76 company stacks and 57 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

Akka	Electron
Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications on the JVM.	With Electron, creating a desktop application for your company or idea is easy. Initially developed for GitHub's Atom editor, Electron has since been used to create applications by companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Slack, and Docker. The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on io.js and Chromium and is used in the Atom editor.
-	Use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with Chromium and Node.js to build your app.;Electron is open source; maintained by GitHub and an active community.;Electron apps build and run on Mac, Windows, and Linux.;Automatic updates;Crash reporting;Windows installers;Debugging & profiling;Native menus & notifications
Statistics
Stacks 1.2K	Stacks 11.6K
Followers 1.0K	Followers 10.0K
Votes 88	Votes 148
Pros & Cons
Pros 32 Great concurrency model 17 Fast 12 Actor Library 10 Open source 7 Resilient Cons 3 Mixing futures with Akka tell is difficult 2 Closing of futures 2 No type safety 1 Very difficult to refactor 1 Typed actors still not stable	Pros 69 Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications 53 Open source 14 Great looking apps such as Slack and Visual Studio Code 8 Because it's cross platform 4 Use Node.js in the Main Process Cons 19 Uses a lot of memory 8 User experience never as good as a native app 4 No proper documentation 4 Does not native 1 Wrong reference for dom inspection

What are some alternatives to Akka, Electron?

Orleans

Orleans is a framework that provides a straightforward approach to building distributed high-scale computing applications, without the need to learn and apply complex concurrency or other scaling patterns. It was created by Microsoft Research and designed for use in the cloud.

RxJS

RxJS is a library for reactive programming using Observables, to make it easier to compose asynchronous or callback-based code. This project is a rewrite of Reactive-Extensions/RxJS with better performance, better modularity, better debuggable call stacks, while staying mostly backwards compatible, with some breaking changes that reduce the API surface.

Sciter

It brings a stack of web technologies to desktop UI development. Web designers, and developers, can reuse their experience and expertise in creating modern looking desktop applications.

wxWidgets

It is a C++ library that lets developers create applications for Windows, macOS, Linux and other platforms with a single code base. It has popular language bindings for Python, Perl, Ruby and many other languages, and unlike other cross-platform toolkits, it gives applications a truly native look and feel because it uses the platform's native API rather than emulating the GUI. It's also extensive, free, open-source and mature.

Netty

Netty is a NIO client server framework which enables quick and easy development of network applications such as protocol servers and clients. It greatly simplifies and streamlines network programming such as TCP and UDP socket server.

Qt5

It is a full development framework with tools designed to streamline the creation of applications and user interfaces for desktop, embedded, and mobile platforms.

JavaFX

It is a set of graphics and media packages that enables developers to design, create, test, debug, and deploy rich client applications that operate consistently across diverse platforms.

React Native Desktop

Build OS X desktop apps using React Native.

Finagle

Finagle is an extensible RPC system for the JVM, used to construct high-concurrency servers. Finagle implements uniform client and server APIs for several protocols, and is designed for high performance and concurrency.

JUCE

It is a C++ framework for low-latency applications, with cross-platform GUI libraries to get your apps running on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android.