For years, Electron was the default choice for building cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies. However, Electron apps are notorious for their massive memory usage and huge binary footprints. In this article, we explain why we built the Qrion desktop app using Tauri.
Bundle Size: 3MB vs 120MB
Electron bundles an entire Chromium browser instance and a full Node.js runtime inside every application package. Tauri, on the other hand, utilizes the operating system’s native Webview (WebKit/WebView2) and uses Rust as the backend controller.
Memory Usage
Because Electron loads an isolated Chromium rendering process, a simple idle window can easily consume 150MB - 300MB of RAM. Qrion’s Tauri client starts up consuming just 30MB of RAM, leaving client resources free for heavy-duty calculations and active WebRTC streaming.