Electron vs React Native Material Design

Overview

Electron

Stacks11.6K

Followers10.0K

Votes148

React Native Material Design

Stacks30

Followers135

Votes5

Electron vs React Native Material Design: What are the differences?

What is 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.

What is React Native Material Design? React Native UI Components for Material Design. An open source project which aims to bring Material Design to Android through React Native by Facebook. The library is made up of many components, which can be found in the sidebar.

Electron can be classified as a tool in the "Cross-Platform Desktop Development" category, while React Native Material Design is grouped under "Mobile UI Frameworks".

"Easy to make rich cross platform desktop applications" is the primary reason why developers consider Electron over the competitors, whereas "Unmaintained" was stated as the key factor in picking React Native Material Design.

Electron and React Native Material Design are both open source tools. It seems that Electron with 74.4K GitHub stars and 9.72K forks on GitHub has more adoption than React Native Material Design with 3.12K GitHub stars and 398 GitHub forks.

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Advice on Electron, React Native Material Design

Semih

Software Engineering Manager

Oct 1, 2020

Needs adviceon

JavaScript

HTML5

.NET

Hi,

We are planning to develop a brand new UX for an already existing desktop software. The previous version is developed on C#.NET with Winforms & WPF. Our plan is to use JavaScript/HTML5 based frontend technologies for the new software. For some components, we are highly dependent on .NET/ .NET Core because the JS-based versions are not mature enough.

What would you choose for a desktop-based Engineering Software that supports multi-OS and has rich UI capabilities considering the .NET dependencies?

Thanks in advance,

Semih

57.9k views57.9k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Electron	React Native Material Design
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.	An open source project which aims to bring Material Design to Android through React Native by Facebook. The library is made up of many components, which can be found in the sidebar.
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 11.6K	Stacks 30
Followers 10.0K	Followers 135
Votes 148	Votes 5
Pros & Cons
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 Each app needs to install a new chromium + nodejs	Pros 4 Unmaintained 1 Android-only
Integrations
No integrations available	React Native

What are some alternatives to Electron, React Native Material Design?

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.

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.

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.

Proton Native

Create native desktop applications through a React syntax, on all platforms.

Weex

Weex renders code in native widgets in Android & iOS and helps preserve the quality of user experience on critical platforms.

SwiftUI

Provides views, controls, and layout structures for declaring your app's user interface. The framework provides event handlers for delivering taps, gestures, and other types of input to your app.

NodeGUI

It is an open source library for building cross-platform native desktop applications with JavaScript and CSS like styling. It is based on Qt5 and NOT chromium, hence it is memory and cpu efficient.