Tauri usually gets compared on two numbers: it is smaller than Electron, and it is written in Rust instead of JavaScript. Both are true, and both undersell where it actually sits once you look past the framework-vs-framework comparison and into the full population of desktop apps.
We track 28,690 macOS and Windows apps by reading the shipped binary, not the source repo or the marketing page. Tauri is a modest slice of that corpus at 5.7%. But it has already done something more specific than "grow": it has passed every other cross-platform or systems-language contender that isn't Electron, on both operating systems.
The ranking
Overall, Tauri sits fifth: behind native C/C++ (18.7%), native Swift/ObjC (18.5%), .NET (17.1%), and Electron (15.6%), and ahead of Qt (3.5%), Python (2.6%), Rust native (2.5%), JVM (2.5%), Flutter (2.4%), and Go native (2.4%).
Split by platform, the picture holds. On macOS, Tauri is 7.4% of the apps we track, fourth place behind Swift/ObjC, Electron, and Cocoa, and ahead of Qt. On Windows, it is 4.5%, fourth behind native code, .NET, and Electron, and ahead of Go native, Qt, and Rust native.
Tauri is not challenging the big four. What it has done is win the tier underneath them, the cross-platform-webview and systems-language challengers it actually competes against for a developer's attention.
The tradeoff that explains the share
Two numbers pull in opposite directions, and together they explain why Tauri looks the way it does.
The median Tauri app on macOS is 27.7 MB. The median Electron app is 515.8 MB, about 18.6 times heavier. On Windows the gap is similar: 23.6 MB versus 391.4 MB. That is the pitch, and it is real.
The dependency count tells the other half of the story. The median Tauri app carries 114 dependencies, against 79 for Electron. Both numbers dwarf Qt (15), .NET (3), and Swift/ObjC (2). Tauri trades Chromium and Node for a webview and a Rust crate ecosystem, but the crate ecosystem has the same sprawl problem npm does. You get a fraction of the footprint, not a fraction of the supply chain.
One more thing falls out of Tauri's youth as a framework: on macOS, only 6.0% of Tauri apps still ship Intel-only, against 14.9% for Electron. Tauri's developer base largely started building after Apple Silicon became the default, so this is a fact about the corpus's age, not a claim that Tauri handles cross-compilation better.
Popularity: wide adoption, thin flagship tier
Every runtime has an app or two that everyone has heard of, and a long tail that nobody has. What separates them is the typical app.
Measured by our 0 to 100 popularity index, Tauri scores a median 23.0 on macOS against Electron's 12.8. On Windows it is 39.9 for Tauri against 36.2 for Electron. In both cases, the flagship tier, the mean of each runtime's ten most popular apps, lands in the same near-ceiling range for both frameworks, around 96 to 99.
Read that carefully: it is not that Tauri makes bigger hits than Electron. It is that the typical Tauri app is more popular than the typical Electron app, on both platforms. Electron's population is older, larger, and far more heterogeneous, four and a half thousand apps ranging from Slack to abandoned side projects, so some of this is likely a younger, more selected cohort rather than anything about the framework itself. We're reporting what we measured, not what caused it.
What's actually inside a Tauri app
Two structural facts about the ecosystem, both read straight from the dependency manifests of every Tauri app we track.
The version 1 to version 2 migration is essentially finished. Of the apps with a readable Tauri crate version, 92.4% are already on Tauri 2.x, and only 126 remain on version 1.
And a real-world plugin census shows what shipped apps actually reach for. tauri-plugin-dialog appears in 64.6% of apps, tauri-plugin-updater in 60.6%, tauri-plugin-opener in 52.0%. Self-updating is close to a default, not a feature, which makes sense for a framework whose distribution model is largely direct download and GitHub releases rather than an app store. Further down the list, the official persistence plugins, tauri-plugin-sql and tauri-plugin-store, show up in a small minority of apps, suggesting most Tauri developers are rolling their own storage rather than reaching for the first-party option.
Tauri's open source repos are gaining stars faster than Electron's
For the subset of apps with a public GitHub repo we actively snapshot, we can measure something neither framework gets compared on: attention over time, not just size at a point in time.
Looking at the 273 Tauri repos and 363 Electron repos in our snapshots with at least 90 days of star history, the median Tauri repo grew its star count 33.3% over that window. The median Electron repo grew 19.75%. The gap holds across the whole distribution, not just at the middle: at the 25th percentile, Tauri is still ahead, 12.0% to 7.1%, and at the 75th percentile, 73.2% to 56.0%.
Some caveats matter here as much as the number does. This only covers apps with a linked, actively tracked public repo, a slice that skews open source, so it says nothing about the closed-source apps in either framework. Stars measure developer attention, not users or downloads. And four and a half months is a window we happened to have, not a trend line, so read this as "in the period we measured," not "Tauri is winning."
The apps people are actually building
A note before the list: our first pass at "most popular Tauri apps by score" included a few rows that didn't hold up once checked. A handful of high-scoring apps carried no Tauri, wry, or tao signal at all in their dependency manifest, and their recorded developer website pointed somewhere unrelated to the app itself, a sign of bad metadata rather than a real Tauri build. Everything below is confirmed against the actual crate signal and a real, on-topic developer site.
Open source, sorted by our popularity score:
- Clash Verge Rev, 97.8. GPL-3.0.
- Jan, 88.4. AGPL, a large GitHub following.
- GitButler, 87.7. Source-available.
- Hoppscotch, 86.9. MIT-licensed core.
- Spacedrive, 71.5. AGPL-3.0.
Closed source, where we could confirm both the framework and a genuine commercial product behind it:
- Grammarly for Windows, 87.1. Genuinely surprising to find in this data: a company the size of Grammarly built its Windows app on Tauri.
- Fing, 74.7. An established commercial network-scanning tool.
- Youdao Dictionary, 74.1. NetEase's commercial translation app, well known in China.
Two more, DBX and Tolaria, pass the same checks but neither has enough of a public footprint for us to independently vouch for what they are beyond what their own sites say.
Where this stops being data
This is a single snapshot, taken August 2026. We don't yet have a second dated corpus to diff against, so nothing here is a claim about Tauri's trajectory, only about where it currently sits. We'll pull this again once we have something real to compare it to.
About this data. Every figure above comes from a single August 2026 snapshot of the corpus, the actual Mach-O executable or PE file and everything bundled beside it, rather than a source repo or a store listing. Want the same breakdown for a different runtime or vendor portfolio? Come ask us.