Handlebars.js vs Vue.js

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Very useful.

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

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.

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.

Since the template-to-virtual-DOM and compiler can be separated, you can compile the templates in your machine and then deploying only the interpreter which is 12KB minified and gzipped.

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.

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.