Electron vs Tauri: 120MB vs 8MB. Here's What Changed.

A productivity app team switched from Electron to Tauri. Their installer went from 120MB to 8MB. Cold-start time dropped 70%. RAM usage was halved. Originally published on pkgpulse.com Those numbers aren't outliers — they're what happens when you stop shipping an entire browser with every desktop app. Electron bundles Chromium. Tauri uses your operating system's native WebView. That architectural difference drives every trade-off between these two frameworks. We compared them using real data from PkgPulse and developer benchmarks. Here's what the numbers say. At a Glance: The Numbers Metric Electron Tauri npm Weekly Downloads 1.66M ~1.4K GitHub Stars 115K+ 88K+ Typical App Size 50-150MB 3-10MB Cold Start Time 1-2 seconds <0.5 seconds RAM Usage (idle) 100-300MB 20-80MB Backend Language JavaScript (Node.js) Rust Rendering Engine Bundled Chromium OS WebView Mobile Support No (Electron Forge only desktop) Yes (Tauri 2.0) Current Version 34.x 2.x License MIT MIT/Apache 2.0 See the full live