Marko vs React

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

Since every single UI component is created independently in JavaScript, it becomes very easy to reuse them throughout your app without having to re-write them.

React is built by Facebook engineers initially to be used only for their inner projects especially to solve the problem of building large complex applications with constantly changing data.

React can render it's components and data server side, then it sends those components as HTML to the browser.

This ensures faster initial loading time and SEO friendliness out of the box, since it's indexed as any other static website by search engines.

Instead of relying on the DOM, React implements a virtual DOM from scratch, allowing it to calculate precisely what needs to be patched during the next screen refresh. This is orders of magnitude faster than fiddling with the DOM itself.

React's one-way data binding (or one-way data flow) means that it's easy to see where and how your UI is updated and where you need to make changes. It's also very easy to keep everything modular, fast and well-organized.

ReactJS can be used independently as the only library for building the front-end, or it can be used alongside JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, or even Angular.

React provides a template engine (JSX) which is easy to use. But it's not mandatory.

The framework is widely used in the industry.

Since React's virtual DOM system is implemented completely in JavaScript, it's very easy to write UI test cases.

React has an official Chrome Extension which is used as a developing and debugging tool. It can be used to quickly and painlessly debug your application or view the whole application structure as it's rendered.

Flux is a platform agnostic pattern which can technically be used with any application or programming language.

One of Flux' main features is that it enforces uni-directional data flow which means that views do not change the data directly.

With React this is useful because this way it's easier to understand an application as it starts getting more complicated. By having two-way data binding, lead to unpredictable changes, where changing one model's data would end up updating another model. By using the Flux architecture, this can be avoided.

Since React v0.15, SVG is fully supported. React supports all SVG attributes that are recognized by today's browsers.

React is just a view library, so you still have (almost) full control over how your app behaves.

Reagent, Om, Rum, etc.

React is used on one of the most visited websites on the planet, Facebook. With stellar results and with millions of people experiencing it every day.