Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

ShepherdJS VS React Native Desktop

Compare ShepherdJS VS React Native Desktop and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

ShepherdJS logo ShepherdJS

Guide your users through a tour of your app.

React Native Desktop logo React Native Desktop

Build OS X desktop apps using React Native
  • ShepherdJS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-29
  • React Native Desktop Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-30

ShepherdJS features and specs

  • User Guidance
    ShepherdJS allows for creating guided tours and feature introductions, which can help in onboarding new users or guiding existing users through new features effectively.
  • Customizability
    The library provides a wide range of customization options for the appearance of the tour steps as well as their behavior, allowing developers to tailor the user experience to meet specific application needs.
  • Ease of Integration
    ShepherdJS is designed to be easy to integrate with modern JavaScript applications and supports various JavaScript frameworks such as Angular, React, and Vue.
  • Accessibility
    It includes built-in features to enhance accessibility, ensuring that tours can be experienced by all users, including those with disabilities.
  • Community and Support
    ShepherdJS has an active community and is backed by frequent updates and bug fixes, which can be valuable for developers seeking support and reliability.

Possible disadvantages of ShepherdJS

  • Learning Curve
    Despite its ease of integration, there can still be a learning curve associated with understanding and implementing the full range of features ShepherdJS offers, especially for new developers.
  • Dependencies
    ShepherdJS has dependencies that need to be managed, which can sometimes lead to conflicts or increase the difficulty of the setup process in certain environments.
  • Performance Overhead
    Implementing tours in a web application may introduce additional DOM elements and require JavaScript execution, potentially impacting performance, especially on resource-constrained devices.
  • Limited Offline Capability
    Like many web-based libraries, ShepherdJS requires a browser environment to function, which can limit its effectiveness in offline scenarios or in cases where network connections are unstable.

React Native Desktop features and specs

  • Cross-Platform Code Sharing
    React Native Desktop allows for code sharing between mobile and desktop platforms, reducing development time and effort. This promotes a unified codebase across iOS, Android, and macOS platforms.
  • React Ecosystem
    Developers can leverage the extensive ecosystem of React and React Native, including libraries, tools, and community support, thus simplifying development and benefiting from existing solutions.
  • Hot Reloading
    React Native Desktop supports hot reloading, which allows developers to see changes immediately without rebuilding the whole application. This greatly enhances development speed and productivity.
  • Native Performance
    React Native Desktop aims to deliver a performance close to native applications on macOS, allowing for smooth user experience and efficient utilization of the system's resources.

Possible disadvantages of React Native Desktop

  • Immature Project
    React Native Desktop is still a relatively young project compared to its mobile counterpart. It may lack some stability, advanced features, and support that are available in more mature frameworks.
  • Learning Curve
    Developers familiar with only web development might find it challenging to adapt to React Native's paradigms and native coding patterns required for desktop applications.
  • Limited macOS-Specific Components
    There might be fewer out-of-the-box components and libraries tailored for macOS when compared to those available for mobile, requiring more custom implementation work.
  • No Official Support
    As an open-source project, React Native Desktop doesn't have official support from Facebook or a large organization, which might lead to slower updates and a greater reliance on community contributions.

Analysis of React Native Desktop

Overall verdict

  • React Native Desktop can be a good choice if you are already invested in the React Native ecosystem and are looking for a way to expand your application's reach to desktop platforms without starting from scratch. It benefits from the familiar JavaScript and React syntax, as well as a large community of developers who contribute to its growth. However, depending on the project's specific needs and the level of maturity expected, it might lack some features or optimizations available in native desktop application frameworks.

Why this product is good

  • React Native Desktop is designed to allow developers to use React Native for creating desktop applications. It leverages the existing React Native ecosystem, which means that developers familiar with React Native can transition to desktop app development more easily. By allowing code sharing between mobile and desktop platforms, it can significantly reduce the development time and effort required to maintain consistency across platforms.

Recommended for

    This framework is recommended for JavaScript developers who are already comfortable with React Native and want to leverage their existing skills to develop cross-platform applications that include desktop environments. It is suitable for projects that require rapid prototyping and consistent user experiences across mobile and desktop devices.

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to ShepherdJS and React Native Desktop)
User Onboarding And Engagement
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100
User Engagement
100 100%
0% 0
Development Tools
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare ShepherdJS and React Native Desktop

ShepherdJS Reviews

8 Best Usetiful Alternatives and Competitors That Are More Professional
Shepherd.js is not a fully developed 3rd party tool like most of the other alternatives that I listed. It is an open-source library to make it easier to create simple product tours.
Source: userguiding.com

React Native Desktop Reviews

We have no reviews of React Native Desktop yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, ShepherdJS seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 10 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

ShepherdJS mentions (10)

  • 7 best product tour JavaScript libraries for frontend apps
    Shepherd.js is a simple JavaScript library aimed at easing the process of making user tours in web applications. It has a clear, intuitive interface wherein you describe your tour step-by-step, which helps improve the tour UX and enhance user understanding: Shepherd.js offers extensive customization options and seamless integration with your application. It prioritizes accessibility with full keyboard navigation.... - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Using React Shepherd to build a site tour
    In this tutorial, I will show you how to use React Shepherd to easily implement a site tour on your website. React Shepherd is a lightweight wrapper library for Shepherd.js that allows us to create a walkthrough of a website — either parts of the site or the whole application — by using dialogs that represent steps that you create. At the end of this article, we will have a functioning site tour as shown in this... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Guided Tours Solution for Your Web Application
    Shepherd is a powerful and customizable open source JavaScript library for creating interactive tours and onboarding experiences in web applications. It uses another open source library Floating UI to render the dialog tours. It offers a simple setup process, dynamic content support, the ability to create custom actions and events, and theming and styling too. More importantly, it is responsive too and never goes... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Reddit: Help us design more content to onboard users
    Using/building something like this would go a long way (https://shepherdjs.dev/) and could also have the benefit of keeping the tours in parity with the current L2 UI. Source: over 2 years ago
  • What is the UX term for those pop-up boxes which helps users with their first few tasks after finishing onboarding?
    We’ve called them Product Tours https://shepherdjs.dev is good. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

React Native Desktop mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of React Native Desktop yet. Tracking of React Native Desktop recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ShepherdJS and React Native Desktop, you can also consider the following products

Intro.js - Simple Javascript framework for adding screen tips

React Native - A framework for building native apps with React

UserGuiding - Create in-app experiences with the most straightforward product adoption platform — quick implementation, lasting user engagement.

Deco IDE - Best IDE for building React Native apps

Userlane - Digital adoption platform with interactive guidance for software applications allowing anyone to understand and master any software from the get-go.

React Boilerplate - Offline-first, highly scalable foundation for your next app