What are the best cross-platform GUI toolkits?

20

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Oct 16, 2018

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Here’s the Deal

19 Options Considered

Best cross-platform GUI toolkits	Price	Platforms	Mobile targets
88 Qt	-	X11, Wayland, MacOS, Windows, Android, IOS	Android, Tizen, IOS, Plasma Mobile, Blackbery
85 wxWidgets	-	–	–
66 Java / Swing	-	–	–
-- Agar	-	–	–
-- nuklear	-	–	–

Qt

Top Pro

Mature and rich library

The are modules for networking, translation, database, data formats, printer support, and more. See More

Top Con

Expensive licence for non-open source developers

$459/month See More

smit patil's Experience

A complete FrameWork See More

Specs

Platforms:X11, Wayland, MacOS, Windows, Android, IOS

Mobile targets:Android, Tizen, IOS, Plasma Mobile, Blackbery

Top Pro

It looks great

Even though beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Qt apps are some of the best looking ones out there. They use the standard OS look and feel See More

Top Con

Non-standard C++ features

Signal/slots and introspection are managed by a C++ precompiler, the meta object compiler (MOC). See More

Top Pro

Best documentation of any development platform

The comprehensiveness of the Qt5 documentation is setting a new bar in the industry. Not only does it explore the entire toolkit in incredible depth, but it does so without being obtuse or using an excess of unfamiliar language. See More

Top Con

Few community widgets available

Top Pro

Open-source

Top Con

GUI Render

On Intel video cards, qml windows have render issues. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation

Professional, thorough documentation with examples, available either in a web browser or in the stand-alone desktop client called assistant. See More

Top Con

Limited SVG support

Compared to other toolkits QtSVG supports only SVGTiny 1.2. See More

Top Pro

Great integration

Qt integrates itself perfectly into all major desktops and operating systems. See More

Top Pro

Global community

The community behind Qt is both massive and approachable. Digia (also owners) are joined by the likes of Intel, KDAB, ICS, Canonical and numerous others in sponsoring development, while communities such as KDE also contribute significantly. Forums are active, mailing lists are open, irc channels chatting, git repositories well managed. Answers to questions are usually minutes away. See More

Top Pro

Bindings for Python and other languages

Top Pro

Event handling is very simple

Qt was written in C++, as opposed to GTK which was written in C. The fact that C++ has been described at "C with classes" lends itself to explaining how the handling of events is so much simpler under Qt. See More

Top Pro

Stable

Only a few bugs. It is easy to migrate between major versions. See More

Top Pro

Mobile support

wxWidgets

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Top Pro

Mature

wxWidgets was started in 1992 by Julian Smart. See More

Top Con

Uses GTK on X11

WxWidgets uses GTK+ on X11 desktop which well known for looking like an alien on non GTK+ desktops. See More

DiplomaticElegua's Experience

I have used wxWidgets in some complex programs and it became easy to master, I use wxFormBuilder to generate a basic GUI code and then I start to customize. Custom rendering can be tricky but I can use SVG designs and render it in my custom controls so I do can get fancy looks. I also made a wxImageButton that can use any supported image with proper scaling, now it can use SVG files too. See More

Specs

Popular Language Bindings:wxPython, wxLua, wxRuby, more...

Top Pro

Truly native look and feel

It uses the platform's native API rather than emulating the GUI. See More

Top Con

Not supported in Python 3

DecisiveBragi's Experience

Lightweight framework. Native looks. Standart c++. See More

Top Pro

Open source

Top Con

Android port not totally usable yet

Top Pro

Can do custom control rendering

You can make a custom renderer using the class wxDelegateRendererNative to draw directly any standard control or using the class BackgroundWindow to use any bitmap as a control background. See More

Agar

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Top Pro

Outdated look

OrganizedGefjun's Experience

Nice looking See More

nuklear

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Top Pro

A single-header ANSI C gui library

Top Con

Very limited documentation

Top Pro

MIT/Public Domain License

Top Con

No input or output implementation provided

User must connect with OS or other libraries to get input or display output on any platform. See More

Top Pro

Small codebase (~18kLOC)

Top Pro

No dependencies (not even the standard library if not wanted)

Top Pro

Bindings for popular languages

Bindings for languages like C#, Java, Python, Go, Nim, Lua and Rust. See More

Top Pro

Fully skinnable and customizable

Top Pro

Focus on portability, efficiency and simplicity

Top Pro

Customizable library modules (you can compile and use only what you need)

JavaFX

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OrganizedGefjun's Experience

Very Nice Looking default theme See More

IUP

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Electron

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Top Con

Not native

Electron uses a web view. This basically means it is just a website wrapped to look like a native application. This is convenient because you can use web tech to develop the application, but it won't be so performant. See More

Top Pro

Healthy community

Github is behind electron and there are a lot of big companies using it to make their cross-platform apps. See More

Top Con

Apps can have memory issues

Apps made with Electron are likely to have memory issues unless you specifically design the app with efficient coding. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

Electron has a nice website with great documentation. It also features a lot of samples. See More

Top Con

No system integration

As it is basically a website running inside a window, there is no integration with the host system. See More

Top Pro

Excellent

Create functional desktop apps with your web skills. Gentle learning curve if you already know web. See More

Top Con

Poorly optimized and resource intensive

It's like running a Chrome-tab for every app you open. See More

NanoGUI

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Tk

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Morphic

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Top Pro

Multiple languages

Including Python, JavaScript, Self, Smalltalk, and Objective-C. See More

Clutter

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Xojo

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Top Con

Subscription-based/Not free

Using this product you're betting the company will still be around. If they get bought out by an enterprise that wants to use the tech internally, all they need to do is stop offering subscriptions and suddenly you're scrambling to rebuild your entire app on other technology. See More

Top Pro

Native, compiled apps

AssertiveAnbay's Experience

We use it at my current employer for our desktop apps. Not a good product. Requires a lot of workarounds to get the app to work well on macOS and Windows, due to bugs and inconsistent behavior across different platforms. It is not as a seamless and as easy as Xojo would have you believe. See More

Top Con

Proprietary Dialect of BASIC

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Supports Windows, macOS, Linux, Pi and iOS. See More

Top Con

Bugs rarely get fixed

The desktop targets don’t get any more love or attention from Xojo, they are all about mobile and raspberry pi. That’s okay if that’s all you need. But if you rely on it for cross-platform desktop development then that’s a problem. The framework is buggy and inconsistent in its behavior between macOS and Windows, so you will find yourself compensating for it by relying on the native APIs and having a lot of conditionally compiled code for each platform. Negating the “Rapid” in RAD. See More

Top Con

Missing features

No auto layout so any marginally sophisticated UI will have to be done programmatically. And because its behavior isn’t consistent across platforms, you will have a lot of conditionally compiled UI code The laggish, flickering UI on Windows looks really bad and slow in the 2018 Beta version. You can literally see it drawing the UI which is astonishing. It will also switch transparency off for all your UI elements, so switching to it somewhere in 2018 will probably be unpleasant. No modern programming features like lambdas, higher order functions, generics, exception-free locking or preemptive multithreading. Your Xojo app will run on a single core and with primitive locking mechanisms. See More

Top Con

No Android support

They plan to eventually support Android, but for now, they only support iOS. See More

Seesaw

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Top Pro

Built on top of Swing

Swing has some negative aspects about it - it's complex and difficult. However, it's stable and can stand alone. Seesaw essentially fills in the gaps that Swing leaves. It patches a lot of the workarounds and hacks that are required with Swing, and allows you to use all the benefits of Swing with considerably less code. See More

HTML5

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