Tauri vs Electron: What I Learned Shipping a Desktop App

If you want the smallest and lightest desktop app and you are willing to write some Rust, choose Tauri. If you need identical rendering on every machine and the largest ecosystem of ready-made packages, Electron is still the safer choice.

I made this decision for Cloister, a messaging app I built and released as open source. What follows is what I learned from actually shipping with Tauri, including the parts that were harder than I expected.

What is the real difference between them?

Both let you build a desktop app with web technology. The difference is where the browser comes from.

Electron bundles its own copy of Chromium and Node.js inside every app. That is why a simple Electron app is often well over a hundred megabytes once installed, and why each one uses memory like a separate browser.

Tauri uses the web view the operating system already provides. On Windows that is WebView2, on macOS it is WebKit, and on Linux it is WebKitGTK. Your interface runs in that web view and the rest of the app is a small Rust program. Cloister's Windows installer is about 5 MB as a result.

Where Tauri was clearly better

Size was the obvious win, and for a messaging app it mattered. Cloister exists because running four chat services felt heavy, so shipping it inside another full browser would have defeated the point.

Memory followed from the same choice. Because the system web view is shared and I control when each service loads, I could load services on demand and put idle ones to sleep.

The security model also suited the project. In Tauri the web side cannot call into the system unless you expose a specific command for it. For an app that displays other companies' websites, having that wall there by default was reassuring.

Where Tauri was harder

The first cost is Rust. Window management, notifications and anything that touches the operating system lives on the Rust side. I wanted to learn the language, so for me this was a reason to pick Tauri, but it would be a real obstacle for a team that only knows JavaScript.

The second cost is that the web view is not the same everywhere. Electron gives you one version of Chromium on every platform. With Tauri you get whatever the system has, which means a feature can behave differently between Windows, macOS and Linux. Cloister started on Windows first for exactly this reason, and support for other systems came later.

The third is ecosystem. Electron has been around longer and almost every problem has a package and a forum answer. With Tauri I read more source code and documentation than I would have liked.

Which one should you choose?

Choose Tauri when the app should feel small and stay out of the way, when you care about download size and memory, and when someone on the team is comfortable with Rust or wants to be.

Choose Electron when you need pixel-identical behaviour across platforms, when you depend on Node.js packages for the heavy lifting, or when shipping quickly with a JavaScript-only team matters more than footprint.

Neither is wrong. They trade the same thing in opposite directions: Electron spends disk and memory to buy consistency, and Tauri spends some of your effort to give that disk and memory back to the user.

For Cloister the answer was easy, because lightness was the whole idea. The source is open if you want to see how the pieces fit, and the link is on the Cloister site.