Tauri or Electron: an 11MB answer
We shipped Lumen Cut at 11MB against a predecessor at 340MB. Here is the honest tradeoff, including where Electron still wins.
Kyaw Swar Lin
Senior Engineer, Desktop
Lumen Studios' old review tool was 340MB installed and used 1.2GB of RAM with a project open. Ours is 11MB and sits around 180MB. That difference is not craftsmanship — it is one architectural choice, and it is not always the right one.
The actual difference
Electron ships Chromium. Every Electron app on your machine is its own browser, its own renderer, its own V8. That is 80–120MB of baseline install and a few hundred MB of resident memory before your code does anything.
Tauri uses the operating system's webview — WKWebView on macOS, WebView2 on Windows, WebKitGTK on Linux — and puts a Rust binary behind it. Your app is your code plus a small native shell.
That is the whole story. Everything else follows from it.
Where Tauri wins
Install size and memory, obviously, and it matters more than people expect for enterprise deployment. IT departments push these over networks to thousands of machines.
Startup time. No Chromium to boot. Cold start is roughly a third.
Native work. Rust for the hot paths is a genuine advantage. Lumen Cut's frame-accurate scrubbing over 4K ProRes is a Rust decode pipeline; doing that in Node would have been a fight.
Security posture. A smaller surface and an explicit permission model for what the frontend may call.
Where Electron still wins
A known Chromium version. With Tauri you are testing against three different webviews with three different sets of bugs. On a design-heavy UI this is real work — we have hit WebKitGTK layout differences that cost days.
Node ecosystem access. If your app leans on npm packages that need Node APIs at runtime, Electron is a straight line and Tauri is a rewrite of those bits in Rust.
Team familiarity. If nobody on the team writes Rust, your Tauri app has a bus factor problem the day it ships. This is a legitimate reason to pick Electron and we have advised it more than once.
Maturity of the long tail. Auto-update, crash reporting, native menus, deep links, protocol handlers — all exist in both, but Electron's are older and the Stack Overflow answers are correct more often.
How we choose
If the app is a tool used by professionals for hours a day, and especially if it touches media, files or hardware: Tauri, and budget for cross-webview testing.
If the app is UI-heavy, needs a specific Chromium behaviour, or the team is JavaScript-only: Electron, and do not apologise for it.
Lumen Cut was Tauri because two hundred editors would have it open eight hours a day and it decodes video. That is about as clear-cut as this decision gets. Most are not.
