Desktop Apps from the Web Stack: Tauri vs Electron vs Deno vs Wails

Building desktop apps from the web stack used to mean Electron and nothing else — but in 2026 the field is genuinely four ways. Tauri v2 ships a sub-600 KB core on a Rust backend, Electron 42 still bundles a full Chromium build, Deno 2.9 just added an experimental deno desktop command, and Wails brings Go to the same space. They all render your UI in a webview, but they make opposite trade-offs on size, memory, language, and security.

That choice matters more than it looks. The framework you pick sets your installer size, your idle RAM, the language your team has to learn, how your app patches security holes, and whether you can ship to mobile later. Most comparison articles stop at Tauri versus Electron and lead with bundle size. This guide goes wider — all four frameworks, the security model each gives you by default, and the honest case for staying on Electron when the rest of the internet tells you to switch.

What follows: a four-way overview, the size-and-memory numbers with vendor figures separated from independently measured ones, a section on each framework, two proprietary matrices — a feature decision matrix and a security-architecture comparison — and a clear recommendation by scenario. For the deeper take on the newest entrant, see our companion guide on Deno’s new cross-platform desktop story.

Every framework here shares the same core idea: render your interface with web technology inside a desktop window, and wire it to a native backend that can touch the file system, the network, and the OS. Where they diverge is the two decisions that drive everything else — what renders the UI, and what language runs the backend.

On rendering, Electron and Deno’s CEF mode bundle a full copy of Chromium so the UI looks identical on every machine; Tauri, Wails, and Deno’s default WebView mode borrow the operating system’s own engine — WebView2 on Windows, WebKit on macOS, WebKitGTK on Linux — to stay small. On the backend, the split is by language: Rust for Tauri, Node.js for Electron, Go for Wails, and TypeScript-on-Deno for Deno desktop. Hold those two axes in mind and the rest of this guide is mostly consequences.

Size is the headline number every comparison leads with, and it is worth getting right — because the figures come from a mix of vendor docs and independent measurements that are easy to flatten into one misleading number. A minimal Tauri v2 app can be under 600 KB at its core, and typical simple apps land at 3–15 MB, because Tauri uses the OS’s native WebView rather than bundling a browser. Electron installers, which carry a full Chromium build, commonly run 50–150 MB and up.

Deno desktop sits in between and reports two figures you should always quote together. Deno’s own docs cite roughly 40 MB for a WebView build; The Register, testing on macOS, measured about 68.5 MB for WebView and about 308.9 MB for the CEF (bundled Chromium) backend — making the WebView default roughly 4.5× smaller than CEF. Wails reports a ~15 MB bundle, but that comes from its own architecture docs, so treat it as vendor-stated until an independent benchmark confirms it.

Read the bars as a band, not a verdict. The Rust-backed tools sit lightest because they bundle the least; the Chromium-bundling options — Electron and Deno’s CEF mode — sit heaviest for the same reason. The numbers below are the closest thing to a clean apples-to- apples test: one real app, the same code, measured on the same hardware.

Tauri reached stable v2 on October 2, 2024, and that release is what made it the default recommendation for new desktop projects in 2026. v2 added iOS and Android targets alongside Windows, macOS, and Linux, so a single Tauri codebase can now reach desktop and mobile — though not every desktop plugin is available on mobile yet, and you author native integrations in Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android.

The size and memory story is the obvious draw — a sub-600 KB core, 3–15 MB installers, 20–100 MB idle RAM — but the architecture is the durable advantage. Tauri compiles a Rust binary with no bundled runtime interpreter, which removes an entire class of supply-chain risk that Node.js-based tools carry. The ecosystem has matured fast to match: Tauri’s plugin registry grew from roughly 47 plugins in January 2025 to over 120 by April 2026, about 2.5× growth in fifteen months. The real cost is the one number that does not appear in any benchmark: your team has to be comfortable in Rust for anything beyond the JavaScript frontend.

Electron is the framework everyone benchmarks against, and it earns the position. The current stable release is v42.5.0, shipped June 23, 2026, bundling Chromium 148.0.7778.271 and Node.js 24.17.0. Because it carries its own Chromium, every Electron app renders identically on every platform — the single biggest reason large product teams keep choosing it. Its process model inherits Chromium’s: one main process with full OS access, plus a sandboxed renderer process per window, with context isolation enabled by default since Electron 12.

The case against Electron is size and memory — 50–150 MB+ installers, 100–300 MB idle RAM, and 120–150 MB of disk for Chromium before your first line of code. The case for it is reach and maturity: Electron powers VS Code (40M+ monthly active users), Slack, Discord, Figma, Notion, Signal, Obsidian, 1Password, and GitHub Desktop — the largest proven production fleet of any desktop framework. It also ships security fixes in lockstep with Chromium, so CVEs are patched as fast as the Chromium team ships them, which matters a great deal for apps with millions of users.

Deno 2.9, released June 25, 2026, is the newest entrant. Its headline is deno desktop — a command that turns a web project into a single native binary with no Electron boilerplate. Two things make it genuinely novel. First, it auto-detects nine web frameworks — Next.js, Astro, Fresh, Remix, Nuxt, SvelteKit, SolidStart, TanStack Start, and Vite SSR — so pointing it at an existing project folder is enough. Second, it uses in-process bindings: the frontend calls backend functions via window.bind() with no IPC serialization round-trip, unlike Electron’s inter-process RPC.

The caveats are equally real, and the project states them plainly. Deno desktop is marked experimental in 2.9 — the command, config keys, and TypeScript APIs may still change, and you need deno upgrade canary to try it today. It supports two rendering backends — a default WebView (~68.5 MB on macOS) and a CEF backend that bundles Chromium (~308.9 MB) — and its auto-update uses bsdiff binary-diff patches on macOS and Linux, but Windows auto-update is not yet supported. The Deno comparison docs themselves list what it still lacks versus competitors: one-step code signing and notarization, Windows MSI and Linux package installers, iOS and Android targets, and runtime permission prompts. Notably, those same docs acknowledge Tauri as the winner for small footprint and mobile.

That community concern is worth sitting with. Desktop is part of a broader Deno strategy: rather than out-compete Node on the server, Deno is carving a niche — single-binary distribution of the web app you already built. For teams shipping Next.js apps that target multiple surfaces, that pitch is real once it stabilizes. The full feature breakdown, including the three rendering backends and the day-one bugs, is in our dedicated Deno desktop deep dive.

Wails is the option for teams whose backend is Go. The stable line is v2.12.0, released March 26, 2026, targeting Windows, macOS, and Linux with the OS-native WebView — WebView2 on Windows, WebKit on macOS, WebKitGTK on Linux. v3 is in alpha; the Wails team describes the API as reasonably stable with applications already running in production, and says v2 will keep receiving critical updates. At roughly 35K GitHub stars it is the smallest community of the four, but a real one.

On developer experience, Wails v3 mirrors the best idea from the rest of the field: it auto-generates TypeScript bindings from Go struct method signatures, so Go errors surface as JavaScript exceptions with no manual glue code, and it uses an in-memory bridge rather than HTTP or IPC. The performance numbers Wails publishes are striking — roughly 15 MB bundles, ~10 MB memory, and sub-0.5-second startup — but every one of those comes from Wails’ own architecture docs. Until an independent benchmark confirms them, quote them as vendor-reported, the same discipline we apply to the API-first architecture patterns that sit behind any of these Go or Rust service layers.

Most comparisons pit Electron against Tauri and stop there. The table below is ours, and it does three things existing comparisons skip: it includes all four frameworks, it adds Deno desktop (too new for most articles), and it labels every size figure by source so vendor claims never masquerade as measured fact. A dagger (†) marks Wails’ self-reported numbers, which are not yet independently verified.

The matrix makes the positioning clear. Tauri wins on size, RAM, and mobile reach, and pairs that with a stable release and a fast-growing plugin ecosystem — the all-round default when Rust is acceptable. Electron trades weight for an unmatched track record and the deepest tooling. Deno desktop is the experimental wildcard with the best developer ergonomics for an existing web app. Wails is the Go-native answer, strong on paper but carrying the lightest verification. Read the size and RAM columns as ranges, not rulings — your real numbers depend on your app and your target.

The axis most size-focused comparisons skip is the one that matters most in production: what security model do you get by default? This is where the frameworks diverge sharply. Electron’s secure configuration is largely opt-in — context isolation is on by default since v12, but a fully hardened app still needs you to work through a configuration checklist. Tauri inverts the burden: the WebView gets zero native access by default, and the only way to reach a system resource is to explicitly grant a capability in the app config. The insecure path is the one that takes extra work.

Strip the matrices down to the questions that resolve most cases: does your team know Rust, do you need identical rendering everywhere, and how mature does the tooling have to be on day one? Those three forks settle the framework choice more often than any feature grid. Here is how we route a real decision.

For most teams we work with, the realistic answer is Tauri for new builds and Electron for anything that needs identical rendering or mature tooling today — with Deno desktop on the watch list and Wails for the Go shops. The discipline that matters is matching the framework to your constraints rather than the loudest benchmark: pick the language your team can maintain, the rendering model your UI actually needs, and the security posture you can defend. That framing is the core of how we approach web development services. For teams distributing internal tools — wrapping a working web UI into a single signed binary with tray controls and auto-update — the same calculus applies to our AI and digital transformation work, and to self-hosted deployment decisions where a native wrapper beats asking staff to run a local server by hand.