Why Electron | Electron

Electron is a framework enabling developers to build cross-platform desktop applications for macOS, Windows, and Linux by combining web technologies (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) with Node.js and native code. It is open-source, MIT-licensed, and free for both commercial and personal use. In this document, we’ll explain why companies and developers choose Electron.
We can split up the benefits of Electron in two questions: First, why should you use web technologies to build your application? Then, why should you choose Electron as the framework to do so?
If you’re already using web technologies for your application, you can skip straight to the Why Electron? section below.
Web technologies include HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and WebAssembly. They’re the storefront of the modern Internet. Those technologies have emerged as the best choice for building user interfaces — both for consumer applications as well as mission-critical business applications. This is true both for applications that need to run in a browser as well as desktop applications that are not accessible from a browser. Our bold claim here is that this isn’t just true for cross-platform applications that need to run on multiple operating systems but true overall.
As an example, NASA’s actual Mission Control is written with web technologies. The Bloomberg Terminal, the computer system found at every financial institution, is written with web technologies and runs inside Chromium. It costs $25,000 per user, per year. The McDonald’s ordering kiosk, powering the world’s biggest food retailer, is entirely built with Chromium. The SpaceX’s Dragon 2 space capsule uses Chromium to display its interface. You get the point: web technologies are a great tech stack to build user interfaces.
Here are the reasons we, the Electron maintainers, are betting on the web.
Modern versions of HTML and CSS enable your developers and designers to fully express themselves. The web’s showcase includes Google Earth, Netflix, Spotify, Gmail, Facebook, Airbnb, or GitHub. Whatever interface your application needs, you will be able to express it with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
If you want to focus on building a great product without figuring out how you can realize your designer’s vision in a specific UI framework, the web is a safe bet.
Web technologies are the most-used foundation for user interfaces on the planet. They have been hardened accordingly. Modern computers have been optimized from the CPU to the operating system to be good at running web technologies. The manufacturers of your user’s devices—be that an Android phone or the latest MacBook—will ensure that they can visit websites, play videos on YouTube, or display emails. In turn, they’ll also ensure that your app has a stable foundation, even if you have just one user.
If you want to focus on building a great product without debugging a weird quirk that nobody has found before, the web is a safe bet.
Whatever provider or customer data you need to interact with, they will have probably thought of an integration path with the web. Depending on your technology choice, embedding a YouTube video either takes 30 seconds or requires you to hire a team devoted to streaming and hardware-accelerated video decoding. In the case of YouTube, using anything other than the provided players is actually against their terms and conditions, so you’ll likely embed a browser frame before you implement your own video streaming decoder.
There will be virtually no platform where your app cannot run if you build it with web technologies. Virtually all devices with a display—be that an ATM, a car infotainment system, a smart TV, a fridge, or a Nintendo Switch—come with means to display web technologies. The web is a safe bet if you want to be cross-platform.
It’s easy to find developers with experience building with web technologies. If you’re a developer, it’ll be easy to find answers to your questions on Google, Stack Overflow, GitHub, or a coding AI of your choice. Whatever problem you need to solve, it’s likely that somebody has solved it well before—and that you can find the answer to the puzzle online.
If you want to focus on building a great product with ample access to resources and materials, the web is a safe bet.
Electron combines Chromium, Node.js, and the ability to write custom native code into one framework for building powerful desktop applications. There are three main reasons to use Electron:
Electron is reliable, secure, stable, and mature. It is the premier choice for companies building their flagship product. We have a list of some of those companies on our homepage, but just among chat apps, Slack, Discord, and Signal are built with Electron. Among AI applications, both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude use Electron. Visual Studio Code, Loom, Canva, Notion, Docker, and countless other leading developers of software bet on Electron.
We did make it a priority to make Electron easy to work with and a delight for developers. That’s likely the main reason why Electron became as popular as it is today — but what keeps Electron alive and thriving is the maintainer’s focus on making Electron as stable, secure, performant, and capable of mission-critical use cases for end users as possible. We’re building an Electron that is ready to be used in scenarios where unfixable bugs, unpatched security holes, and outages of any kind are worst-case scenarios.
Our current estimation is that most desktop computers on the planet run at least one Electron app. Electron has grown by prioritizing talent in its maintainer group, fostering excellent and sustainable engineering practices in managing the ongoing maintenance, and proactively inviting companies betting on Electron to directly contribute to the project. We’re an impact project with the OpenJS foundation, which is itself a part of the Linux foundation. We share resources and expertise with other foundation projects like Node.js, ESLint, Webpack - or the Linux Kernel