The history of Node.js desktop applications starts back in 2011 with Roger Wang, the creator of NW.JS. He started the node-webkit project as a simple Node.js module that can create a browser window using WebKit--the browser engine used by Safari. The main advantage of the node-webkit module was that you can use Node.js APIs inside the webpage. But this implementation relied on the WebKit library, which lacked lots of modern browser features. Later, Roger improved the node-webkit by replacing WebKit with the chromium embedded framework (CEF). CEF is also an open source project that facilitates embedded browser use cases in third-party applications.

In 2012, Intel (where Roger Wang was working) recruited Cheng Zhao, a Chinese student, as an intern to work on the node-webkit project. But instead of improving the current implementation he started by rewriting everything based on chromium's content shell, which is a minimal browser implementation inside the chromium project. He kept working with Roger at Intel for node-webkit until v0.3.6. In the meantime, GitHub was developing their atom editor. Cheng ended his internship with Intel and joined GitHub to work on Electron. After the efforts to migrate atom to node-webkit failed, they decided to write a new shell with fundamental architectural changes from node-webkit. The new shell was named atom-shell. Later, it was renamed to Electron.