Express.js vs CodeIgniter

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.

Setting up CodeIgniter is quick and easy. You can download the version you want from the CI homepage or directly pull the latest version from GitHub. After that, you unzip the contents to the directory that's required. The final step is to edit the config.php to suit your needs and it's set up and ready for development.

There are also a lot of guides and tutorials from developers who have been using CI for a long time. This is because of the relative old age of the framework and the large community behind it.

CodeIgniter has a small footprint, just 3MB and that's including the user guide.

The documentation is clear, structured and thorough. It explains both commonly used and CodeIgniter specific concepts and always with clear examples.

Because it's relatively old and well-liked, it has an active community of developers behind it. It's used by a lot of websites in production.

The MIT License (MIT)

CodeIgniter is open source and is distributed under the MIT license.

CodeIgniter is tested by hundreds of thousand of developers that use it in production. This means that it's very hard for any bugs or problems to go unnoticed. Even when a new version is out, bugs are quickly found and patched up.

CodeIgniter has it's own templating engine built-in. It's based on a mustache-like templating language which is easy to learn for new developers who have never seen it. While experienced developers will feel very comfortable using it.

CodeIgniter lets you cache the web pages in order to decrease loading times and increase efficiency and performance.

CI4 will be out soon & is a rewrite..
"CodeIgniter 4 is a rewrite of the framework and is not backwards compatible."
So it will support ALOT more newer functionality built-in.