Handlebars.js vs Marko

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.

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

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>

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

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

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

Avoids ugly globals and "named" templates.

var template = require('./template.marko');
var html = template.renderSync({name: 'Frank'});

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

Easy Integration with Express and Node

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

JavaScript expressions can be executed inside the templates.

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

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

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

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

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).

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.

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