What are the best full-stack isomorphic JavaScript frameworks?

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May 18, 2019

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Here’s the Deal

4 Options Considered

Best full-stack isomorphic JavaScript frameworks	Price	GZipped size	Last Updated
-- Meteor	-	-	Oct 17, 2018
-- FeathersJS	-	-	May 18, 2019
-- Derby	-	-	Apr 13, 2016
-- Catberry	-	-	Apr 13, 2016

Meteor

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Top Pro

Easy to learn

Meteor was developed with simplicity in mind, even for beginners who have just started using JavaScript frameworks. One of the reasons that beginners should start with Meteor is that Meteor is a full-stack framework, this way they can get the complete learning experience when it comes to web development (back-end and front-end development), all by using a single platform and a single language. Furthermore, Meteor does not have complex and esoteric concepts that may be hard to grasp by a beginner, it has a clear documentation and well-established coding conventions. There's also a very useful resource for learning Meteor in the form of a book: Discover Meteor, by the authors of many Meteor packages. See More

Top Con

No native SEO support (no server-side rendering)

Meteor does not have support for server-side rendering of views, which is extremely helpful when it comes to SEO. However, there's a third-party server-side rendering package available for download. The Meteor team has also said that server-side rendering is on the roadmap. Though lately Google has announced that the search engine can render JS and CSS files just like modern web browsers See More

Daniel Galarza's Experience

Clean and efficient development experience for prototyping any type of application See More

Top Pro

Integrated front-end library

Meteor uses both your existing front-end library and it's own library called Blaze, which is integrated beautifully in the framework and fulfills the purpose of a true MV* front-end framework. See More

Top Con

Officially supports only MongoDB, which is well-known to have issues with data integrity

MongoDB advertises scalability but only if you don't care about data-integrity. There are other backend options but none of them are officially supported. See More

CredibleBuchis's Experience

So fast and easy to learn! See More

Top Pro

Full-stack reactivity

Changes in the database will be propagated to all subscribed clients in real time, without you having to write any code. See More

Top Con

Requires reliable network connection

It's common for the front-end and back-end to lose sync if an internet connection is flaky. Even though the connection should be in real-time, if the connection is weak, you may lose that real-time sync. For example, in chat applications you may have to refresh the page to get the latest updated data from the server. See More

Top Pro

Seamless communication between client and server

Meteor is built on top of Node.js and jQuery on the client. Meteor enables the client and server to communicate data seamlessly, in real-time. You don't have to write any REST API or pub/sub code - Meteor takes care of it all automatically for you. See More

Top Pro

Isomorphic package system

A Meteor package can supply code for both the client and the server, and for mobile (Cordova) apps. For example, an autocomplete package supplies both server code to search a collection, and client code to display the results. The mdg:camera package supports the native camera if the app is built for mobile, or the HTML getUserMedia API to take pictures from the browser. See More

Top Pro

Auto reload/refresh (hot code push)

Every time a change in the source file is saved, all connected clients will refresh automatically - browser tabs, mobile apps running in the simulator or on the physical device. Or, deploy a Meteor app (meteor deploy myapp) and all clients, plus all mobile apps with the server set to myapp.meteor.com will automatically reload to use the code changes. This drastically reduces the development cycle for apps in the App Store, where a regular update can wait for one to two weeks before being approved. See More

Top Pro

Popular

Meteor is the 10th most starred project on GitHub and has overtaken even Rails. See More

Top Pro

Support for MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis

While Meteor only supports MongoDB and Redis natively, MySQL support is on the roadmap, and there are 3rd-party packages that integrate MySQL reactively with Meteor to some extent, such as numtel:mysql. For reactive PostgreSQL support, there is numtel:pg. See More

Top Pro

Real-time testing framework

Meteor also has an official testing framework called Velocity. Velocity enables real-time unit testing and integration with Jasmine or Mocha syntax. Tests are automatically run when code is saved and the testing result is indicated by a green or red dot in the upper right corner of the app. See More

Top Pro

Includes latency compensation

The client will mimic instant server-side response, and updates automatically if it was different once the information is available. See More

Top Pro

Built-in security

Meteor takes care of many concerns with it's out-of-the-box security measures. See More

Top Pro

Mobile apps from the same code base

Meteor can generate mobile (iOS and Android) apps from the same codebase as the web app, using the Cordova (PhoneGap) library (which brings native device functionality to JavaScript applications). Meteor-generated mobile apps are JavaScript, HTML and CSS bundles that run in a UIWebView (on iOS) or WebView (on Android). Apps can be run locally in the iOS/Android emulator, or on physical devices. You can also publish them to Google Play Store or Apple's App Store. Moreover, these hybrid mobile apps benefit from hot code push, which dramatically accelerates the development cycle. See More

Top Pro

Eliminates the need to look for a database to use

Meteor uses MongoDB, eliminating the choice among NoSQL databases. MongoDB is highly scalable - used to store petabytes of data and perform billions of operations daily at eBay, FIFA, Adobe, Craigslist, McAffee, Foursquare and others. See More

Top Pro

Gets rid of Node's callbacks

Although Meteor's server side runs on top of Node.js, it manages to avoid callbacks by making use of Fibers. See More

Top Pro

Extensive ecosystem

Meteor's package repository called Atmosphere has more than 5000 packages available. What's more is that Meteor can also use into the packages available for the Node ecosystem. See More

Top Pro

Powerful performance monitoring tools

Meteor uses Kadira which is an excellent performance monitoring tool for Meteor apps. It profiles CPU and RAM consumption, subscription latency and throughput etc. See More

Top Pro

VC-funded open-source

Bright future for Meteor - funded by venture capital and open-source. See More

Top Pro

In-app debugging

The community behind Meteor has created a useful application for debugging Meteor apps that will automatically delete collections and display client-side documents, allow you to control subscriptions and lets you modify the documents. Meteor also has great support for server-side debugging, and WebStorm has also released full support for Meteor, including debugging capabilities. See More

FeathersJS

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Not much info outside of the docs

While the docs are good and showcase simple pseudo-applicatopms, there is not much else i the from of things like auth integration, optimal front end pairing for SPA's, books/videos, and so on. Only a few (mostly outdated) articles focusing on the simplest possible scenarios. See More

Top Pro

Support for different socket transports

FeatherJS uses primus which is a universal wrapper for real-time frameworks. Through primus you can easily choose which socket transport you want to use. See More

Top Con

Not very beginner friendly

Although the documentation for Feathers is very good, it still needs some configuration in order to get Feathers up for developing something with it. See More

Top Pro

Can sync events between different Node instances

Feather can sync events happening in two different Node processes or even servers in real-time. For example: an event happens in server A, the user connected to server B is instantly notified of that event. This is done through a central Redis or Mongo collection or through a websocket libraries' clustering library. See More

Top Pro

Can be integrated in an existing ExpressJS project

Since Feathers itself is built on top of Express (it's a thin wrapper over socket.io, primus and Express) and because of Feathers' highly modular nature, it's very easy to integrate Feathers in an existing Express project. See More

Top Pro

Plug-in any feature you need

Feathers makes extensive use of modules (which are called Feathers services). These services work like ExpressJS middleware and can be used with app.use('/path', serviceObject). Services help developers keep their applications modular and as minimal as possible, without any unnecessary libraries or bloat. See More

Top Pro

Easy REST APIs

Through services, Feathers provides instant CRUD functionality, it also can easily expose a RESTful and real-time API through HTTP/HTTPS and websockets. See More

Derby

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Views are rendered on the server

Derby renders it's client-side views on the server. This means that there's no "delay" in serving the content to the browser when the user requests it. It's also very helpful for SEO purposes. See More

Top Con

Small community

Derby seems to have a small community of followers, at least compared to other Node full-stack frameworks. So it could be difficult for a beginner to find examples or help if they get stuck somewhere in their development. See More

Top Pro

Real time communication between server and client

Derby enables the client and server to sync models across the board in real-time. See More

Top Con

May not be ready for production

Since Derby is still on version 0.8.x, it may not be ready for production for large applications since a lot of the API and features may change in the future. See More

Top Pro

Same code can be run on the client and server

The same code can be run on both the server and the client, because Derby is a full-stack JavaScript-everywhere platform. See More

Catberry

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Views are rendered on the server progressively

Catberry employs server-side progressive rendering to render its views in the browser. This is achieved through Node's streams and parallel rendering. See More

Top Con

Seems to be very popular only in non-English speaking countries

Catberry seems to be very popular in countries where English is not a native language (for example Russia). For this reason it can be very hard to find any resources in English outside the Catberry website. See More

Top Pro

Easy to understand how a Catberry application works even when it starts getting complicated

Flux is a platform agnostic pattern which can technically be used with any application or programming language. One of Flux' main features is that it enforces uni-directional data flow which means that views do not change the data directly. This is useful because this way it's easier to understand an application as it starts getting more complicated. By having two-way data binding, it can lead to unpredictable changes, where changing one model's data would end up updating another model. By using the Flux architecture, this can be avoided. See More

Top Pro

SEO friendly

The search crawler receives the rendered page from the server just like a normal user would. This makes applications developed with Catberry very SEO-friendly. See More

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