Limitations

Electron is a cross-platform framework which allows to develop Desktop applications. They are “native” in a sense that you will build and package the installer for your users, but the integration with OS is limited to what the framework provides, and making custom integrations is not trivial, because the application logic is written in JavaScript and executed by Node.js, so if you want to access OS capabilities, you’ll need to write a Node addon. We’ll talk about that later, but it is not the most straightforward thing, although it can definitely be done. … Shipping the browser also means that we ship its security model. Back in the day, a single JS crash would kill all browser tabs, but today each tab crashes independently. In Electron, this means that every window is its own process and there is no easy way to share data between each window. There is IPC helper implementation, and if each of your windows is on the same domain, you can use broadcastChannel API, but that is inter-process communication with its own set of downsides like non-shared memory and no way to pass any non-standard data. Another thing to keep in mind is that Electron is normally a pre-compiled binary, and that is what the final binary application is unless you compile the source code by yourself. This means that it if you need to handle some OS-level events (e.g. extend AppDelegate on macOS), you might need to re-compile Electron with your native code statically linked. … At this point, you might ask: “well, why would I actually use Electron?”. The main reason to use Electron is that despite all the drawbacks, it is a truly cross-platform framework which minimizes differences between platforms. For example, Tauri (at least at the time of writing, July 2025) relied on the system WebView (essentially Microsoft Edge on Windows and Safari on macOS) and uses Rust to compile the app code to machine instructions, which allows the binaries to be very compact, like ~10-20MB vs ~50-90MB with Electron. However, the system WebView can be very different on Windows 8 vs on some Linux distro vs very old macOS version. This is especially bad on Linux (see this GH Issue), but debugging issues specific to old OS versions is not fun on Windows and macOS as well. Interesting that Tauri is exploring including the frontend runtime with the binaries (ref) to help with this exact issue, but it will definitely increase the size.