Hey,
I am writing cause I wanted to get some (more) opinions from folks here that have actually built and shipped with Electron.
Background: Building an API IDE on Electron. It’s a pretty original desktop tool with a lot of editor/IDE-like behavior - not the typical form centric behavior that postman or others have: local workflows, richer interactions, and some things that honestly would have been much harder for us to build and iterate on this quickly in a more constrained setup. Thats why Electron.
this is the tool: <a href="http://github.com/voidenhq/voiden" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">github.com/voidenhq/voiden</a>
Now, as adoption is growing, we are starting to get the usual questions about memory footprint and app size.
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/fetch/s--WF3fVOV3--/f_auto,q_auto/https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/78745019-8a0a-4fcb-91b1-210efb417a66.webp?_a=BAMAMiWQ0" alt="">
The (slightly) frustrating part is this:
When the app is actually being used, the app-side memory is often pretty reasonable. In many normal cases we are seeing something like 50–60 MB for the actual usage we care about (even added it in the app itself for people to check it out).
But then people open Activity Monitor, see all the Chromium/Electron-related processes, and the conversation immediately becomes:
“yeah but Tauri would use way less”
And then, without realizing, I suddenly end up talking and philosophizing about Electron, instead of discussing the tool itself (which is what I am passionate about :)
And of course, I get it. The broader footprint is real. Chromium is not free. Electron does has overhead and I dont want to be foolish pretending otherwise. All I can do it keep optimizing…
At the same time, I do feel that a lot of these comparisons feel weirdly flattened. For example people often compare:
full Electron process footprint VS the smallest possible Tauri/native mental model
…and that, without always accounting for development speed, cross-platform consistency, ecosystem maturity, plugin/runtime complexity, UI flexibility, and the fact that some apps are doing much more than others. Which is by the way the reason that we went with Electron.
So all this context to get to my real question, which is:
<ul>
<li>How do you explain this tradeoff to users in a way that feels honest and understandable, without sounding like you are making excuses for Electron?</li>
</ul>
And also, for those of you who have had this conversation a hundred times already:
<ul>
<li>What do you say when people reduce the whole discussion to “Electron bad, Tauri good”?</li>
<li>Have you found a good way to explain footprint in practical terms?</li>
<li>Where do you think optimization actually matters, vs where people are mostly reacting to the idea of Electron?</li>
</ul>
Mostly trying to learn how others think about this , especially those who have built more serious desktop products and had to answer these questions in the wild.
Would love your thoughts and advice!

Nikolas Dimitroulakis

A developer building an API IDE on Electron shares frustration with user perception around memory footprint and the 'Electron bad, Tauri good' narrative. Despite the app using 50–60 MB in actual usage, users see multiple Chromium processes in Activity Monitor and immediately push for Tauri. The post seeks advice from experienced Electron developers on how to honestly communicate the tradeoffs—development speed, cross-platform consistency, ecosystem maturity, UI flexibility—without sounding defensive, and how to reframe footprint discussions in practical terms.

Electron vs Tauri - (how do you explain tradeoffs to users?)