Express.js vs Sails.js

Setting up a new Express project is very easy. It consists of installing a handful of libraries through NPM run a single npm install and everything is ready to go.

Express' extremely powerful routing API allows developers to do tasks ranging from building a REST API to building the routes for a simple web app and then take it to the next level by using route parameters and query strings.

With a little learning curve, it is a good choice for new NodeJS developers to get started quickly. Express boasts great, thorough documentation.

Node.js Foundation

Announcement here

The Node.js Foundation is a Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems.

Being a somewhat old Node.js web app framework and being one of the most widely used frameworks, Express.js has matured quite a lot during all that time. It's more stable than its competitors and a huge community backing it.

Express takes advantage of Node's NPM to distribute and install countless plugins made by third parties which solve almost anything a developer would want to do with Express.

It's by far the most popular framework for node.

Express has a big community with a lot of guides and tutorials written about it by developers that have been using it for quite some time.

You can easily add oAuth integration/social logins to your next web app without much hassle, using this authentication middleware for connect.

Very simple and fast.

If you have not already checked out the Express.js ecosystem of middleware, you should.

Sails.js is built with a focus on building real time communication apps such as chat or multiplayer games, so naturally it has Socket.io extremely well supported.

This could be a huge plus, if you prefer to build your apps using the Model View Controller architecture. Using Sails.js you'll find the task of separating the business logic from the user interface and keeping the interactions between them in a separate layer, extremely easy.

Exposes public JSON API for free. No additional routing to be defined. Makes it pretty easy to access data from anywhere.

Sails.js uses Waterline ORM at its backend which means you can store your data in any datastore that you like; all you have to do is make a change to the Waterline adapter, this will allow you to store your data in MySQL/Redis or any other kind of database.

Clear documentation and easy to understand. The file structure gives you a way to understand where you can start to develop when you encounter a new Sails project