When comparing Inferno vs Rivets, the Slant community recommends Rivets for most people. In the question“What are the best JavaScript libraries for building a UI?” Rivets is ranked 6th while Inferno is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Rivets is:
Rivets takes DOM element as input, which has special attributes prefixed with 'rv-'. So you may declare DOM element in whatever language you like, even in HTML.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Modular
Use it however you want in a framework of your own custom design. When things change in the industry, swap things out instead of being locked in by someone else's design.
Pro Pretty light-weight
Inferno weighs in at 9kb gzipped, which is light-weight.
Pro Fast performance
Inferno is one of the fastest UI libraries around and widely considered the fastest.
Pro React compatability
Using the Inferno compatibility package ("inferno-compat"), Inferno can support the vast majority of React codebases.
Pro Doesn't require special DOM declaration syntax like JSX
Rivets takes DOM element as input, which has special attributes prefixed with 'rv-'. So you may declare DOM element in whatever language you like, even in HTML.
Cons
Con Some React components may not work with Inferno
Inferno and React have different public and private APIs. If 3rd party components use a private API then it's almost certainly going to break when you use it with Inferno.
Once React Fiber is implemented, even libraries that are currently working will break and will not be supported by Inferno.
Con Not very popular
Which can hinder one's opinion of its future, but the future of all "frameworks" is to break things into smaller pieces, so inferno very well might get used by the big names in the future.
Con Seems to be abandoned
No new commits have been pushed since March 2015.