pug (Jade) vs XSLT in-browser implementation

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.

I.e. apply one template on top of another.

With ability to split feature implementation apart from main codebase, development became quite more manageable. Example: for data of particular type you could define own rendering or render refine rules; pipelining allows incrementally change UI by adding/removing elements depend of parameters, data values, previously rendered content.

Only template engine which utilizes multithreading.

In some browsers(IE) XSLT during load is compiled into DLL. In others pre-loaded template allows to skip recurring parsing .

XML when stored, saved outside of JS heap, capable to work with amount of data 100x larger of JSON.

Supported in all browsers, starting from IE5.

XSLT is available as in browser as on server side via various libs including highly optimized for CPU.