Wails

Wails is an open-source framework for building desktop applications using Go for the backend logic and standard web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) for the frontend UI, created by Lea Anthony. It follows a similar architectural philosophy to Electron and Tauri, but distinguishes itself by using Go as the backend language instead of Node.js or Rust. This makes Wails particularly attractive to developers already invested in the Go ecosystem who want to leverage their existing skills and libraries to build native desktop apps. Unlike Electron, which bundles a full Chromium browser, Wails uses the native webview component of the operating system (WebView2 on Windows, WKWebView on macOS, WebKitGTK on Linux), resulting in significantly smaller application bundles — typically 10MB or less compared to Electron's 100MB-plus bundles. Wails provides a rich set of features including: automatic Go-to-JavaScript binding (methods and structs defined in Go are automatically exposed to the frontend as callable JavaScript functions), native menu and dialog support (file dialogs, message boxes, context menus), tray icon integration, clipboard management, drag and drop support, custom protocol handlers, live development mode with hot reload, asset embedding (all frontend files are compiled into a single binary using Go embed), and cross-compilation support for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The framework uses the Wails CLI for project scaffolding (wails init), development (wails dev), and building production binaries (wails build). As of 2026, Wails has over 26,000 GitHub stars and is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.