What are the best JavaScript templating engines?

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What are the best JavaScript templating engines?

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Sep 25, 2023

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33 Options Considered

Best JavaScript templating engines	Price	Repository	GZipped size
73 pug (Jade)	-	https://github.com/pugjs/pug	-
69 Handlebars.js	-	-	-
57 Vue.js	-	https://github.com/vuejs/vue	~30KB
51 Mustache.js	-	-	-
-- Nunjucks	-	-	-

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score 161 · Answer 1

pug (Jade)

Top Pro

Easy to read, powerful mixins

Jade supports mixins. These not only make your templating job easier but are also super-easy to read. See More

Top Con

Cannot copy/paste examples from the internet

Examples from CSS frameworks like Bootstrap are never utilizing the Pug syntax, which means that you cannot ever copy/paste something to quickly see how it would look or if it works. You would have to convert the HTML to Pug first. See More

Adam Fields's Experience

At first I wasn't a fan of the "HAML" syntax (no tags), and I still don't get what the pipe operator is, but I use Pug (FKA Jade) for all of my templating needs. One of my motivating factors was to go with the most popular, and Pug is just dominant in the JavaScript world. I use Pug with Express, as well as Webpack (generating my index.html), and Vue (you can pick your template language in .vue files which is so cool). I recommend https://devhints.io/pug as a cheatsheet since Pug syntax is pretty weird when your brain is conditioned to think in HTML. See More

Specs

Repository:https://github.com/pugjs/pug

Top Pro

Logic done in JavaScript

The logic in Jade is done with native JavaScript. This means there's less of a learning curve and it'll be easier to get other developers up to speed. See More

Top Con

Unforgiving in case of indentation errors

The structure is entirely determined by the indentation. That means that indentation errors will ruin the end result, often without an easy way to find the error. Indentation errors are easily introduced by copy-pasting, by rearranging code and by working in a team where not everyone uses the same indentation style. (E.g tabs vs. spaces.) See More

Jan Eriksson's Experience

Been using jade as template language when developing vue.js apps and I really like it. Makes the vue components much cleaner and easier to read. See More

Top Pro

Clean syntax

One of the distinguishing features of Jade is its clean syntax. Elements are created with CSS selector syntax which makes the template consistent with your style sheet and JavaScript element selector library. See More

Top Con

off-side rule templating language not working well with native HTML

plain HTML pages usually can contain very deeply nested structures, whether they are hand-written by web UI designers or generated from popular web design tools or taken from existing HTML templates, which are a nightmare for front-end engineers to convert into Pug templates, where you have to take care of handling the indentation rules and the deeply nested HTML elements, even creating multiple blocks that don't have any meaning in terms of business logic, just to house the HTML elements within bearable amounts of indentations. Pug templates are nice for Python programmers who don't want to learn HTML to start writing web pages and develop some entire websites personally from the ground up, but for any serious project that involves more than half a dozen people and has separate positions of web UI designers, front-end developers, and back-end engineers, it's much better to choose something more closely compatible with native HTML as the template engine. Pug is simply too alien from native HTML and resembles a lot more like those other off-side rule languages like Python. See More

dan2600's Experience

Easy to start working with, but ugly and hard to read. Much easier to read and faster templates out there. See More

Top Pro

Identation reflects nesting

With Jade you can quickly overview the hierarchy of a template. See More

Top Con

Bad performance

Bad sintaxe (Short-hand HTML) and bad performance. No streaming or asynchronous calls. https://github.com/mauricionobrega/nodejs-template-benchmark See More

Mauricio Nobrega's Experience

Bad sintaxe (Short-hand HTML) and bad performance. Not have streaming and asynchronous calls See More

Top Pro

High performance on the server and client side

Apart from their functionality all template engines need to be efficient in terms of the time they require to render a page. Jade beats most of its competitors in this area, it is highly optimized to deliver good performance on both the server and client ends. See More

Top Con

Performance is not great compared to other popular templating engines

Tim Etler's Experience

The language design choices for Pug are incredibly clean See More

Top Pro

Easy sublayouts using block and extends

By using the extends and block keywords, sublayouts can be made with intuitive syntax. See More

SpiritedSoteria's Experience

Whereas there are great alternatives pug has been my go to and has never dissapointed. Mixins graceful and its power lies in its powerful templates includes. All rounded very good even for beginners. See More

Top Pro

Preprocessor support

Filters make it easy to embed compiled languages such as coffeescript or markdown directly into the template. A filter will allow you to keep your inline code and content consistent with the rest of your codebase so you can continue using your prefered language with your outputted HTML. See More

ResourcefulAglibol's Experience

I just got introduced into templating engines as am new to web dev. But am an intermediate .net programmer in C#. I found pug very easy to setup, learn, and understand. Handlebars requires a lot of "setting-up" to get it running. And the pug syntax is so clear. The reason for templating engine ( imho) is to make code shorter. pug does that gracefully. However, if you're and expert, you wont have any trouble setting up handlebars See More

Top Pro

Allows writing inline JavaScript

Jade allows embedding regular JavaScript code directly within the template. See More

Top Pro

Reuse code in other languages

In addition to JavaScript, you can reuse Jade templates in Scala, PHP, Ruby, Python and Java. See More

Top Pro

Interactive documentation

There's an interactive documentation available here that allows you to play around with code examples and watch the results in real time. See More

Top Pro

Compiles to JavaScript

Jade compiles to a JavaScript function that produces the ultimate output. This interim format makes it useful for embedding in conditions where you're trying to save space or decrease processing requirements. See More

Top Pro

Use Markdown for readable markup

Jade is awesome at templating structural markup, but that's not all Jade is awesome at. It also allows you to use markdown within your template itself which will render to a beautiful HTML page. See More

See All

score 87 · Answer 2

Handlebars.js

Top Pro

Multiple implementations

Handlebars is available as a JavaScript library, a Django module as well as Java, Ruby, Scala, .Net & PHP libraries, which means you can use it for frontend and backend templating in the language of your choice. See More

Top Con

Hard to use documentation

Although the documentation exists and is fairly comprehensive, it's not always clearly written, and there is no search capacity. See More

Top Pro

Clean syntax

Handlebars's syntax is very readable and easy to understand. See More

Top Con

Handlebars are still an HTML code

Handlebars use the standard HTML syntax with its own {{tags}} for templating. This doesn't add much to readability or design speed. See More

Top Pro

Clear separation of logic and markup

If something is not within {{ and }}, it's not Handlebars. As a result, Handlebars "weaves" through HTML, instead of trying to become an invalid extension of it. See More

Top Con

Using partials is cumbersome

"In order to use a partial, it must be registered" using some JavaScript method attached to some global variable. See More

Top Pro

Copy/Paste code from the internet

Examples for Bootstrap or other CSS frameworks are always in HTML. With Handlebards you can just copy and paste the examples in your code. With something like Pug (Jade) you have to convert the HTML to Pug (Jade) first. See More

Top Con

Server-side handlebars.js requires Javascript based server to render on the server

A Node.js or any other Javascript-based server is required to have handlebars.js render server-side. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use for templating things other than HTML

The syntax allows the output to be any text and does not contrain the user to HTML output only. There are examples of handlebars being used to produce SQL, javascript and other programming language code. See More

Top Con

Not much editor support

Handlebars.js doesn't seem to have many text editors that support things like auto-complete, syntax highlighting or error checking for it. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use any template also as partials

Templates may be nested and reusable parts can be factored out. See More

Top Con

Does not play well with Angular.js

.. or any framework where you wish to compile handlebars.js template to the template understanable by the framework. See More

Top Pro

Compiled rather than interpreted templates

Handlebars.js allows you to pre-compile your templates so that the loading time at the client end could be reduced when your templated page is loaded. See More

Top Pro

Mustache compatible

You can import Mustache templates and add extra functionality, that's provided by Handlebars, on top of them. See More

Top Pro

Good global helpers support

Top Pro

Logic-less

By design, logic-less templates force you to separate concerns thus helping you avoid future problems with refactoring. It also allow templates to be used with multiple programming languages without changes. See More

Top Pro

Good paths support

With Handlebars.js you can create bindings with variables inside any path in your application. See More

Top Pro

Easy to define extensions

With a few lines of code, a new extension (control or templating function) can be implemented. It will be called by the compiled templates. See More

See All

score 45 · Answer 3

Vue.js

Top Pro

Single file component

Very useful. See More

Top Con

Although it is pitched as lightweight it can and will be heavy.

Although the library in itself is lightweight. In order to create the full program you have to add lot of third-party libraries and write a lot of code too. In which it becomes a very heavy program (4mb > ~). See More

Jason Nazario's Experience

It was easy to learn, easy to use and very quick for me to build functional prototypes. I came from Angular and React, VueJS was a nice breath of fresh air for the front-end. See More

Specs

GZipped size:~30KB

Repository:https://github.com/vuejs/vue

Top Pro

CLI and Webpack integration

EnchantingVucubCaquix's Experience

not a templating engine but a frontend framework. It rivals React and Angular which are not templating engines. See More

Top Pro

Vuex store, events system

Top Pro

VueRouter

Top Pro

Can be easily used with other front-end stack

Vue can easily be integrated with other front-end libraries. This makes it an extremely versatile tool. It's easy to fix its shortcomings or compensate for missing features by just plugging in another library. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

Vue.js weighs in at 16kb min+gzip. See More

Top Pro

Support for both templates and JSX

You can choose to use either a templating language, or if you feel it's necessary to drop on a lower virtual-dom level, you can use JSX. This is simply done by replacing the template option with a render function. Or alternatively, you can embed functions inside templates by using the <render> tag. See More

Top Pro

Reactivity system

Top Pro

Can be used with any front-end stack

Vue can easily be integrated with other front-end libraries. This makes it an extremely versatile tool and it's easy to fix its shortcomings or missing features by just plugging in another library. See More

Top Pro

Responsive server-side rendering

Since most of the mainstream server-side rendering implementations are synchronous, they can block the server's event loop when the application is complex. Vue implements streaming server-side rendering, which allows you to render your component, get a readable stream and directly pipe that to the HTTP response. This allows you to have a responsive server and decreases the time your users have to wait before they get your rendered content. See More

Top Pro

SEO friendly

Starting with Vue 2.0, Vue supports server-side rendering. This helps with SEO a lot, since the views are rendered directly on the server, which are indexed by search engines. See More

Top Pro

Supports inline templating

Although you can build components in JavaScript files, you can also use inline handlebars-like templating in your HTML views where simplicity is often a more sane choice. See More

See All

score 19 · Answer 4

Mustache.js

Top Pro

Clean syntax

Mustache provides you with a clean and easy to understand syntax. Having a syntax that is readable is always a huge plus, since this means easier maintenance and code readability in the future. See More

Top Con

Basic tasks are difficult

Mustache js's attempts at making some things simple makes them so easy that they're almost difficult. That is the case with some basic tasks like figuring out how to apply css to shade odd/even rows on your template based content. See More

Top Pro

Available in lots of languages

Available in a wide variety of languages including Ruby, JavaScript, Python, C++, Scala, Go, Julia, Swift and more. See the full list here. See More

Top Con

Bested by Handlebars in many ways

Handlebars being an extension of Mustache bests it in both speed and power. It adds additional features to Mustache which make writing templates easier and faster. Benchmarks have also shown that Precompiled Handlebars renders in about half the time of Mustache and the rewritten Handlebars (current version) is 5 to 7 times faster than Mustache. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

Mustache is easy to deliver. If you need more features down the road, you can switch to handlebars, which is a superset of Mustache. See More

Top Pro

Logic-less

By design logic-less templates force you to separate concerns thus helping you avoid future problems with refactoring. It also allow templates to be used with multiple programming languages without changes. See More

Top Pro

Server side support

Mustache.js has multi-language server side support, which essentially means you can use mustache based templates on languages other than javascript. (like if your server-side was built on Java you could still use Mustache.js) See More

Top Pro

Can be compiled

Mustache templates can be compiled to JS files, so that they can be directly loaded. See More

See All

score 31 · Answer 5

Nunjucks

Top Pro

Very user friendly

Top Con

Seeking new maintainer

mohammad toosi's Experience

very simple, many APIs and also match with gulp See More

Top Pro

Building blocks for CMS Websites

Another token based system with all of the logic, looping and variable control that other engines provide. But in addition it supports some more advanced page composition elements e.g. block inheritance, includes, layout inheritance, custom tags and macros — all absolutely perfect for a CMS where pages are typically composed of a series of “building blocks”. Reference: link See More

HonorableTiurakh's Experience

I used pug, ejs and nujucks, Nunjucks is my choice! so cool features like inheritence composition etc... I don't understand why people don't use it more. See More

Top Pro

Suppported by Mozilla

ProductiveMarzanna's Experience

Nunjucks provides more features for static site creating than any other framework listed. The ability to interact with complex data using mixins, speeds up development time. See More

Top Pro

Has Jinja2 as role model

Top Pro

Open Source

See All

score 32 · Answer 6

EJS

Top Pro

Complete JavaScript logic

EJS uses all the JS jargon and logic, so if you're proficient in JS, you can use EJS right away. See More

Top Con

No support for block by default

EJS has no support for the block functionality which allows you to reuse pieces of templates across different files. Although it can be added to EJS through a third-party library. See More

HealthyKhonsu's Experience

It works outstanding, and having much high performance and easy to use syntax, even it'a look ugly/ See More

Top Pro

Same language before and after rendering

Your html/text remains pretty much the same before and after rendering. EJS filters out and performs its functions on any occurrences of its own <%= %> tags in your template. See More

Top Con

Cryptic syntax

Much more difficult to read, especially for designer/HTML people who don't write JavaScript. See More

OptimisticUllr's Experience

EJS survived all new 'inventions' so far... See More

Top Pro

Lightning-fast to learn

EJS introduces fairly small amount of new syntax that one has to learn to become fully proficient. The syntax itself is easy to comprehend for anyone who is even somewhat familiar with JavaScript and CSS. See More

Top Pro

Consistently scores rather well in benchmarks

According to some benchmark tests, EJS is way faster than Jade or Haml. See More

Top Pro

Powerful error handling

EJS has a really smart error handling mechanism built right into it. It points out to you, the line numbers on which an error has occurred, so that you don't end up looking through the whole template file wasting your time in searching for bugs. See More

See All

score 14 · Answer 7

Underscore Templates

Top Con

Not a true templating engine

template in underscore is simply a function which compiles a piece of template into HTML. It's useful for rendering HTML from JSON and it's not very useful when building complex frontend templates. See More

Top Pro

For micro templating

Due to Underscore's optimized performance and ease-of-use it can be deemed as most fit for use in small sections of your code, where you just want a quick and simple template to render your content. See More

Jonah's Experience

_.template is just easy since you're probably using underscore or lodash anyway why load another templating library. See More

Top Pro

Pre-compilation

Underscore allows you to compile your template once before data is inserted to it. See More

See All

score 10 · Answer 8

React

Top Con

Mixes markup (JSX) and JS

React components are typically written in JSX, a JavaScript extension syntax allowing quoting of HTML and using HTML tag syntax to render subcomponents. This is a React-specific grammar extension to JavaScript like the now-defunct E4X. HTML syntax is processed into JavaScript calls of the React framework. For more information refer to [this link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/React_(JavaScript_library) . This is not good if you believe that markup and JS should have separate concerns. See More

Top Pro

Server side rendering

React can render it's components and data server side, then it sends those components as HTML to the browser. This ensures faster initial loading time and SEO friendliness out of the box, since it's indexed as any other static website by search engines. See More

Specs

GZipped size:45K

Top Con

Large file size

React's react.min.js is 145.5KB in size. It's much larger than some other libraries that offer roughly the same features and it's almost the same size as some MV* frameworks such as Angular or Ember that offer more features out of the box. Although, it should be mentioned that sometimes having a smaller library may force developers to reinvent the wheel and write inefficient implementations on features that React already has. Ending up with a larger application that's harder to maintain and/or that has bad performance. See More

Top Pro

One-way data flow

React's one-way data binding (or one-way data flow) means that it's easy to see where and how your UI is updated and where you need to make changes. It's also very easy to keep everything modular, fast and well-organized. See More

Top Con

Heavy on memory

React's virtual DOM is fast, but it requires storing elements in the virtual and real DOM increasing memory usage for the page. This can be a real problem for single-page webapps designed to be left running in the background. See More

Top Pro

Template engine independent

React provides a template engine (JSX) which is easy to use. But it's not mandatory. See More

See All

score 12 · Answer 9

Dust.js

Top Pro

Filters

Easily extendable using filters and helpers. Can consume any public API. See More

Top Con

There are no new releases

And apparently Linkedin will not support it more. See More

FascinatingDaikokuten's Experience

Small footprint See More

Top Pro

Cache templates at the client side

Dust.js compiles its templates to plain old javascript, and since javascript files are cacheable, that essentially means your templates can be cached at the client side. See More

Top Con

Not enough community support

Since the number of people currently using Dust.js is quite insignificant as compared to Mustache js and Handlebars, you're less likely to get your question answered or issue resolved if you start using it. See More

Top Pro

Write once run anywhere

Since Dust's templates are written in JS, there's nothing stopping you from running the same DustJS code both on the client as well as server side (if it supports V8/Rhino JS engine). See More

Top Pro

Interactive tutorial

Dust.js is quite easy to begin with, thanks to it's powerful interactive tutorial. See More

See All

score 53 · Answer 10

Marko

Top Pro

Extremely fast

Marko consistently outperforms other alternatives in code benchmarks, both on rendering speed and compilation time. See More

Top Con

If you want to get the full experience you have to use NodeJS

To use markojs's most popular feature: SSR although you can use any language based server as a backend. It is rather complicated. See More

Top Pro

Custom tags

Custom tags provide a simple mechanism for embedding more complex components into a template by extending the HTML grammar with support for new tags. For example: <div> <say-hello name="World"/> </div> Custom tags are easy to create since they just map to a JavaScript "renderer" function as shown below: module.exports = function sayHelloRenderer(input, out) { out.write('Hello ' + input.name + '!'); } Custom tags support nested content: <fancy-overlay title="My Title"> This will be the body content of the overlay </fancy-overlay> Custom tags can also have parent/child relationships to support more complex use cases such a "tabs" component with nested "tab" components: <fancy-tabs> <fancy-tabs:tab label="Home"> Content for Home </fancy-tabs:tab> <fancy-tabs:tab label="Profile"> Content for Profile </fancy-tabs:tab> <fancy-tabs:tab label="Messages"> Content for Messages </fancy-tabs:tab> </fancy-tabs> See More

Top Con

Very opinionated and not customizable enough

Some custom use cases are not possible. For example, trying to build an AMP page using Marko can be very challenging (special style tag requirements are hard to work with, also, Marko by default inserts a script tag into the rendered output html which is invalid in AMP and needs to be manually removed, etc..) See More

Top Pro

Streaming

Streaming allows progressive HTML rendering and reduces time to first byte. See More

Top Con

Not very popular

Marko doesn't seem to be very popular yet. With only ~ 400 stars on GitHub. This may be a problem for beginners because there are not many learning resources outside the official documentation. See More

Top Pro

Server-side rendering

Marko supports both server-side and client-side rendering. See More

Top Con

Not very popular

Marko is not a very popular templating engine. As such, it may be hard to find support for it in the form of plugins for text editors, guides or libraries to integrate it with different frameworks. See More

Top Pro

Marko Widgets

Marko Widgets allows UI components (rendering + behavior) to be built using Marko. See More

Top Pro

Compiled templates are readable CommonJS modules

Avoids ugly globals and "named" templates. var template = require('./template.marko'); var html = template.renderSync({name: 'Frank'}); See More

Top Pro

Asynchronous rendering

Marko makes additional asynchronous calls after the view rendering has begun. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight runtime (~4 KB gzip)

Top Pro

Easy to integrate with express.js

Easy Integration with Express and Node See More

Top Pro

Documentation is well maintained and helpful

The documentation is extensive and very helpful. It also contains several sample applications which are very useful. See More

Top Pro

Allows JavaScript expressions

JavaScript expressions can be executed inside the templates. See More

Top Pro

Simple and readable syntax

Marko has a HTML-like syntax which should be easy to read and understand for everyone who has even minimal experience in web development. See More

Top Pro

Short learning curve

It is easy to get up to speed and understand what is going on in a very short period of time. See More

Top Pro

Small compiled templates

Marko's compiled templates are usually very small, as proven by benchmarks. See More

Top Pro

Lots of tests

To prevent regressions, Marko includes a full suite of tests. The testing harness renders a collection of templates and does an exact string comparison to make sure that the tests rendered exactly as expected. There are also API tests, and negative tests to make sure that errors are reported in a friendly way. To run tests: git clone https://github.com/marko-js/marko cd marko npm install npm test See More

Top Pro

Friendly compile-time error messages

Error messages come in an easy to read and friendly format, with valid stack traces and file formats of the file(s) which brought the error(s). See More

Top Pro

Latest version of Marko offers a new concise syntax which can also be used with the original HTML syntax

Marko is a templating engine that supports a very clean HTML syntax with the option to use a concise syntax that can even be mixed with each other. The Marko v3 syntax is shown below: <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <title>Marko Templating Engine</title> </head> <body>  <h1> Hello ${data.name}! </h1> <ul if(notEmpty(data.colors))> <li for(color in data.colors)> ${color} </li> </ul> <div else> No colors! </div> </body> </html> The following template is the same as the one above but written with the new "concise" syntax: <!DOCTYPE html> html lang="en" head title - Marko Templating Engine body // Welcome to Marko! h1 - Hello ${data.name}! ul if(notEmpty(data.colors)) li for(color in data.colors) ${color} div else - No colors! See More

Top Pro

Concise and Mixed syntax

The Concise syntax type lets you write Marko with a Jade-like indentation based syntax, and the Mixed mode lets you combine in regular HTML-style syntax. See More

Top Pro

Server and client logic can easily be expressed within the same template

Top Pro

Has a very active and interactive community

Marko's development community is rather small compared to other frameworks but community is well mannered and active. You can chat with the core development team using gitter.im See More

See All

score 4 · Answer 11

Hogan.js

Top Pro

Server side compilable

Top Pro

Compilable into pure Javascript for Speed

Top Pro

Mustache Compliant

See All

score 8 · Answer 12

lit-html

Top Pro

It's just JavaScript

It's powered by a JS-feature called tagged template literals. No JSX. Manipulate templates as strings with all the power of JavaScript available to you. See More

score 1 · Answer 13

Webix

Top Pro

Awesome responsive material skins

Great design and icons pack. See More

Top Pro

Great support from the webix team

The company behind webix is really quick in answering any questions you have on their forum or via email. See More

Top Pro

Webix Jet

The webix Jet library adds all the required features for SPA development (routing, template loading, ...) See More

Top Pro

A lot of widgets

Webix is one of the most extensive UI component libraries, second only to Sencha ExtJS. Not only considering the number of widgets, but also the API methods for manipulating these widgets. See More

Top Pro

Views can be constructed using JavaScript without HTML

The most common way of working with webix is to create a JSON configuration of your view in JavaScript. When you use TypeScript, you get complete typechecking and intellisense in your IDE. See More

Top Pro

Mature project

Regular updates and releases. See More

Top Pro

Seems to be quite stable

Even the most complicated GUIs are bug-free most of the time. See More

See All

score 5 · Answer 14

Swig

Top Pro

Object oriented template inheritance

Top Con

Multiple/Inconsistent encapsulators

{% %} and {{ }} is more to remember. See More

Top Pro

Uses plain HTML

Swig uses plain HTML for its templates which makes it rather easy to get used to if you have not worked with a template engine before. See More

Top Con

No updates for at least 6 months

Swig has not received any new commits since June 25 2015. See More

See All

score 5 · Answer 15

Template7

SpontaneousHermodr's Experience

Template 7 has the same syntax as Handlebars but it's light and fast. I liked it cuz it has js_if which is more powerful than the plain if. See More

score 6 · Answer 16

Twigjs

Top Pro

Comepetible with Twig on PHP

Top Con

Design for backend (node) and is slow on front-end

score 1 · Answer 17

Hyperscript (virtual-dom/h)

Top Pro

Simple, fast, and functional API

Top Con

Cannot copy-paste HTML

As this is not based on HTML, but JS, you first need to convert HTML snippets to it. See More

score 4 · Answer 18

Closure Templates

Top Pro

Language independent

The same template written in Closure would work both on Java as well as javascript. See More

Top Con

Hard to find what you need in documentation

Docs are pretty, but hard to find exactly what you need. Although language has nice macros, you're going to hate them when they fail and you search for info for half an hour. See More

Top Pro

Well Tested and used by Gmail and Google Docs

Closure Templates being a project created by Google, is extensively used in some of the world's most famous and largest web apps which include Gmail and Google Docs. What this means for you is that you'll be using a Template engine that has not only been intensively tested but also that you'll be in good company, with lots of technical support. See More

Top Con

Strange errors from compiler

You won't get used to them even after a while. See More

Top Pro

Secure

Closure has been designed keeping most security risks in mind. Templates created using Closure are auto-escaped automatically. Hence you won't have to worry about any XSS attacks. See More

Top Con

Not widely used outside of Google

Closure Templates are mostly used in projects developed by Google and not in projects by third-parties. As such, it's unlikely for further versions to be released or for changes to be merged. See More

Top Pro

High Performance

Closure templates do not tend to slow down your site's performance or increase your page load time. They're compiled to extremely efficient JS code so that your page renders extremely fast, whether the templating is done on the client end or the server end. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 19

slim.js

Top Pro

Easier to learn and use

Leverages web components, uses the platform, reduced weight. See More

Specs

GZipped size:5KB

Repository:https://github.com/eavichay/slim.js

Price:Free

Platforms:All

See All Specs

33 Options Considered

My Recommendation for pug (Jade)

My Recommendation for pug (Jade)

Easy to read, powerful mixins

Cannot copy/paste examples from the internet

Logic done in JavaScript

Unforgiving in case of indentation errors

Clean syntax

off-side rule templating language not working well with native HTML

Identation reflects nesting

Bad performance

High performance on the server and client side

Performance is not great compared to other popular templating engines

Easy sublayouts using block and extends

Preprocessor support

Allows writing inline JavaScript

Reuse code in other languages

Interactive documentation

Compiles to JavaScript

Use Markdown for readable markup

My Recommendation for Handlebars.js

My Recommendation for Handlebars.js

Multiple implementations

Hard to use documentation

Clean syntax

Handlebars are still an HTML code

Clear separation of logic and markup

Using partials is cumbersome

Copy/Paste code from the internet

Server-side handlebars.js requires Javascript based server to render on the server

Easy to use for templating things other than HTML

Not much editor support

Easy to use any template also as partials

Does not play well with Angular.js

Compiled rather than interpreted templates

Mustache compatible

Good global helpers support

Logic-less

Good paths support

Easy to define extensions

My Recommendation for Vue.js

My Recommendation for Vue.js

Single file component

Although it is pitched as lightweight it can and will be heavy.

CLI and Webpack integration

Vuex store, events system

VueRouter

Can be easily used with other front-end stack

Lightweight

Support for both templates and JSX

Reactivity system

Can be used with any front-end stack

Responsive server-side rendering

SEO friendly

Supports inline templating

My Recommendation for Mustache.js

My Recommendation for Mustache.js

Clean syntax

Basic tasks are difficult

Available in lots of languages

Bested by Handlebars in many ways

Lightweight

Logic-less

Server side support

Popular

Can be compiled

My Recommendation for Nunjucks

My Recommendation for Nunjucks

Very user friendly

Seeking new maintainer

Building blocks for CMS Websites

Suppported by Mozilla

Has Jinja2 as role model

Open Source

My Recommendation for EJS

My Recommendation for EJS

Complete JavaScript logic

No support for block by default

Same language before and after rendering

Cryptic syntax