Advanced Installer vs Electron Forge

Advanced Installer is a Windows authoring tool for building packages that install, update, and configure software products. It creates MSI, EXE, and MSIX packages; listed output formats also include APPX, App-V, MST, and ThinApp. Command-line packaging, silent installation, auto-updates, and delta updates are supported. Continuous integration support includes Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, TeamCity, and Bamboo. The Architect edition can repackage legacy installations and provides MECM and Intune integration for packaging and deployment workflows. Freeware features are available without a license for Simple projects; licensed features require a valid license. Professional costs $399 a year, Enterprise costs $1,399 a year, and Enterprise Team costs $3,599 a year for five users. One-time purchase options are listed at $599 per user for Professional and $2,399 per user for Enterprise. Non-freeware features have a 30-day trial, but trial-built packages are for testing only. The current application requires Windows 10 or 11; produced MSI or EXE installers are listed for Windows 7 or newer and Windows Server 2008 R2 or newer.

Electron Forge is a free, open-source tool for packaging and distributing Electron applications on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Its build pipeline brings together code signing, installer creation, and artifact publishing. Makers generate platform-specific distributables, including Squirrel.Windows, ZIP, DEB, RPM, DMG, AppX, and Flatpak formats. Publishers can send outputs from the make command to distribution services, update servers, or storage such as an S3 bucket. Developers can initialize projects with create-electron-app and choose first-party Webpack, Webpack with TypeScript, Vite, or Vite with TypeScript templates. The Plugin API supports custom build logic, and custom Makers and Publishers can address additional build or storage targets. The GitHub Publisher supports GitHub Releases and, with host configuration, GitHub Enterprise. Documented auto-update options include a free Electron team service for open-source GitHub apps, static storage publishers, and a hosted update server; macOS auto-updates require a signed app. Getting started requires Node.js 16.4.0 or later, Git, and a JavaScript package manager. Packaging requires node_modules on disk and does not account for symlinked dependencies or Yarn Plug'n'Play.