Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Standard Widget Toolkit VS Avalonia

Compare Standard Widget Toolkit VS Avalonia and see what are their differences

Standard Widget Toolkit logo Standard Widget Toolkit

The Eclipse Foundation - home to a global community, the Eclipse IDE, Jakarta EE and over 350 open source projects, including runtimes, tools and frameworks.

Avalonia logo Avalonia

A multi-platform .NET UI framework
  • Standard Widget Toolkit Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-08-02
  • Avalonia Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-05-01

Standard Widget Toolkit features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Avalonia features and specs

  • Cross-Platform
    Avalonia supports Windows, macOS, and Linux, enabling developers to write a single codebase that runs on multiple platforms.
  • MVVM Support
    Avalonia has strong support for the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern, which can help developers create maintainable and scalable applications.
  • Rich Styling System
    Avalonia provides a powerful styling system similar to CSS, giving developers the ability to easily customize the appearance of their applications.
  • Open Source
    Being open-source, Avalonia allows developers to contribute to its development, inspect the codebase, and ensure long-term viability without vendor lock-in.
  • Community Support
    Avalonia has an active and growing community, which can be beneficial for troubleshooting issues, finding resources, and sharing knowledge.
  • ReactiveUI Integration
    It integrates seamlessly with ReactiveUI, a powerful reactive programming library, for building dynamic and responsive applications.

Possible disadvantages of Avalonia

  • Maturity
    Avalonia is relatively young compared to more established frameworks like WPF or WinForms, which might result in fewer features and stability issues.
  • Smaller Ecosystem
    Given its younger age, Avalonia has a smaller ecosystem with fewer third-party libraries, tools, and components available for developers.
  • Performance
    Depending on the complexity of the application, performance may not be on par with native frameworks, especially on resource-intensive tasks.
  • Learning Curve
    Developers new to Avalonia may face a learning curve, especially if they are not familiar with its MVVM pattern and reactive programming paradigms.
  • Documentation
    Although improving, the documentation for Avalonia might not be as comprehensive or as polished as that of more mature frameworks.
  • Platform-Specific Issues
    Cross-platform development can bring platform-specific issues and inconsistencies that developers need to handle, which can increase complexity.

Analysis of Avalonia

Overall verdict

  • Avalonia is considered a strong choice for developers seeking a cross-platform framework with a focus on desktop applications. Its continuous improvements and feature set make it appealing for projects requiring a unified codebase across multiple operating systems.

Why this product is good

  • Avalonia is praised for its unique cross-platform capabilities, enabling developers to write applications that run on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It uses XAML, which is familiar to developers with experience in WPF or UWP, promoting a quicker learning curve. Furthermore, Avalonia boasts a modern and flexible UI framework, an active development community, and a growing set of controls and third-party integrations.

Recommended for

    Avalonia is recommended for developers who are familiar with XAML-based technologies and are looking to build cross-platform desktop applications. It's particularly well-suited for projects targeting multiple desktop environments with a single codebase, as well as for those who value a consistent UI experience across different platforms.

Standard Widget Toolkit videos

University of Maryland TerpSoft Standard Widget Toolkit

Avalonia videos

A Cross Platform .NET UI Framework - Hello World in Avalonia UI

More videos:

  • Review - Nikita Tsukanov - AvaloniaUI - cross-platform XAML-oriented .NET UI framework
  • Review - Avalonia XAML debugging. Where is your WPF/UWP/Xamarin.Forms now?

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Standard Widget Toolkit and Avalonia)
Cross-Platform Development
Development Tools
4 4%
96% 96
Rapid Application Development
.Net
25 25%
75% 75

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Avalonia seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 142 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.

Standard Widget Toolkit mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Standard Widget Toolkit yet. Tracking of Standard Widget Toolkit recommendations started around Mar 2021.

Avalonia mentions (142)

  • The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
    Check out https://avaloniaui.net as well. It's basically a cross-platform reimplementation of WPF. It's not quite as simple as C#+WinForms or Lazarus+LCL because you don't get drag-and-drop UI designer, and you need to write markup by hand (albeit with live preview). But unlike HTML, it's actually designed for desktop UI apps from the get go, so it's much easier to write for anything non-trivial. And you can still... - Source: Hacker News / 16 days ago
  • Show HN: Meld RDP – A Fast, Portable Remote Desktop Manager (.rdp)
    - It's built with https://avaloniaui.net/ so it may be possible to get it working on Linux, though I have little experience there. Would love to hear any feedback, ideas, or feature suggestions! Thanks for checking it out! https://github.com/meld-cp/MeldRDP. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • WASM Wayland Web (WWW)
    > The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash. WebAssembly is different. WebAssembly brings every language to the web. Flash didn't. WebAssembly can render to canvas and enable applications that compile to desktop, mobile, and the web. UI libraries like Avalonia do this: https://avaloniaui.net/ For example, here's C# implementation of Visual Basic 6... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Servo in 2024: stats, features and donations
    That's why I mentioned https://avaloniaui.net/ which does the part. WPF is not bad compared to everything happening in the web frameworks. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Compiling Java into Native Binaries with Graal and Mill
    I don't know why anyone even uses the GUI frameworks from Microsoft these days. WinForms is only good if you need to throw something together quick. Everything else should be Avalonia (https://avaloniaui.net/). Cross platform and does support AOT. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Standard Widget Toolkit and Avalonia, you can also consider the following products

Qt - Powerful, flexible and easy to use, Qt will help you not only meet your tight deadline, but also reduce the maintainable code by an astonishing percentage.

Uno Platform - Build Mobile, Desktop and WebAssembly apps with C# and XAML.

GTK - GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

JavaFX - JavaFX is the next step in the evolution of Java as a rich client platform.

Flutter - Build beautiful native apps in record time 🚀

wxWidgets - wxWidgets: Cross-Platform GUI Library