Wails

Electron for Go developers, minus the 200MB bloat. Wails lets you build desktop apps with a Go backend and any JS frontend framework, using the OS native webview instead of bundling Chromium. The result: tiny binaries, low memory usage, and native-feeling performance.

Tauri is the closest competitor — same webview approach but with Rust. Electron is the incumbent with the largest ecosystem but infamous resource consumption. Neutralinojs is another lightweight option with less community traction.

Where Wails wins is developer experience for Go teams. You bind Go structs directly to the frontend — no JSON marshaling, no IPC boilerplate. The auto-generated TypeScript bindings mean type safety across the stack. Build times are fast, and the resulting app feels native.

The catch: Wails has a smaller ecosystem than both Electron and Tauri. Fewer plugins, fewer templates, fewer Stack Overflow answers. If you're not already a Go developer, Tauri gives you the same lightweight benefits with a much larger community. Cross-platform consistency can also be spotty — webview behavior varies between OS versions.