pug (Jade) vs Marko

Jade supports mixins. These not only make your templating job easier but are also super-easy to read.

The logic in Jade is done with native JavaScript. This means there's less of a learning curve and it'll be easier to get other developers up to speed.

One of the distinguishing features of Jade is its clean syntax. Elements are created with CSS selector syntax which makes the template consistent with your style sheet and JavaScript element selector library.

With Jade you can quickly overview the hierarchy of a template.

Apart from their functionality all template engines need to be efficient in terms of the time they require to render a page. Jade beats most of its competitors in this area, it is highly optimized to deliver good performance on both the server and client ends.

By using the extends and block keywords, sublayouts can be made with intuitive syntax.

Filters make it easy to embed compiled languages such as coffeescript or markdown directly into the template. A filter will allow you to keep your inline code and content consistent with the rest of your codebase so you can continue using your prefered language with your outputted HTML.

Jade allows embedding regular JavaScript code directly within the template.

In addition to JavaScript, you can reuse Jade templates in Scala, PHP, Ruby, Python and Java.

There's an interactive documentation available here that allows you to play around with code examples and watch the results in real time.

Jade compiles to a JavaScript function that produces the ultimate output. This interim format makes it useful for embedding in conditions where you're trying to save space or decrease processing requirements.

Jade is awesome at templating structural markup, but that's not all Jade is awesome at. It also allows you to use markdown within your template itself which will render to a beautiful HTML page.

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