Why we chose Tauri over Electron

[jleni]

We get asked about this a lot so figured we'd write it up properly.

Lens runs on Electron. So do most "desktop" K8s tools. The problem is well known at this point: Electron bundles an entire Chromium instance, eats 500MB+ of RAM just sitting there, and leaks memory over time. If you're managing clusters all day, that overhead adds up. Especially when the tool you're running is supposed to help you monitor resource usage, the irony isn't lost on anyone.

We went with Tauri instead. The backend is Rust, the frontend is React rendered in your OS's native webview. The result:

• Install size is around 30MB instead of 200MB+
• Idle memory sits around 80-120MB instead of 400-600MB
• Startup is near-instant
• No bundled Chromium, no separate Node.js process

The tradeoff is real though. Tauri's ecosystem is younger. Some things that are trivial in Electron require more work. The webview has slight rendering differences across platforms. And you can't just npm install your way through everything since the backend is Rust.

For us the tradeoff was worth it. Our users are engineers managing production infrastructure. Their machines are already running Docker, minikube, maybe a few IDEs. The last thing they need is another Electron app competing for RAM.

We'll keep sharing technical decisions like this here. If you have questions about the stack, ask away.

(Disclaimer: We are the dev team)

[iamvishvaakesav]

Hi, really informative. I was eyeing on tauri for a long time now an had small success incorporating it in our enterprise. However as we are about to develop a bunch of internal tools across departments I suggested the use of it again but was turned down over dotnet equivalents. I still have some stake to suggest it again, but how good will this be when compared to the dotnet solutions like Avalonia UI or Platform UNO ?? and can you explain more on the decision of tauri over native framework?

[jleni]

Good question. For us it came down to two things: our stack is React + TypeScript for the frontend, and our team has deep experience in systems-level languages (C++, Rust). Tauri lets us use both — Rust backend, web frontend.

[iamvishvaakesav]

Makes sense Leni! , I suggested it once again, waiting for the final call. This also motivates me to go in a tangent and build something personal with tauri, I hope to find out the depths of this framework as I go. And my apologies for the typos in the previous message.