Aurelia vs Marko

Full support for Typescript built in

Clear, intuitive and HTML/SVG compliant binding syntax.

Examples:

Default binding => value.bind

One Way binding => value.one-way

Two Way binding => value.two-way

One Time binding => value.one-time

Configured to give you the most common use cases by convention, which means you only need to change the default configuration for edge cases. This means that for normal cases far less boiler plate code has to be written.

Aurelia includes native support for ES6 and even comes with a Gulpfile which helps with transpiling ES6 code to ES5.

Aurelia is extremely unopinionated and was designed to be highly modular. This gives the developer the freedom to develop their application however they want, without forcing them in paradigms or rules predefined by the framework. Likewise, any of the individual components can be swapped out if so desired.

Aurelia developers always try to keep within existing and emerging Web Standards, making it easier for developers to follow best practices in web development.

Most of the code you write is Aurelia-agnostic. It's one of the closest libraries that you'll find to basically write plain-old, vanilla Javascript or TypeScript code (classes) and doesn't polluate your HTML/SCSS. That way you can easily test it, switch to another implementation and make it look clean (business oriented). Even the HTML.

Learning aurelia basically means learning EcmaScript and HTML, since aurelia is designed for standards compliance. Also, aurelia embraces upcoming ES language features by convention, such as ES class decorators for dependency injection, encouraging clean architecture and future-proof code.

The syntax used to bind variables within the application class is very similar to Javascript itself. You can specify the type of the binding you are using explicitly, which practically self-documents your code and makes it easy to understand whether a value is one-way or two-way binded.

Aurelia.js consists of modules that can be used as a full framework or separately.

One of the most crucial pieces of any new technology or framework is the documentation. At present even though Aurelia is pre-beta, the documentation is pretty complete. There are code examples missing and whatnot, but for the most part it is concise and makes the main parts of the application easy to understand.

Aurelia is officially backed by Durandal Inc. and has commercial and enterprise support is available.

Aurelia defaults to one-way data binding, alining with conventional wisdom. However, there are times when two-way data binding proves useful, such as binding an input widget with a view-model. Aurelia makes two-way data binding available to developers and uses it by convention when appropriate.

Aurelia can be used alongside of React and Polymer, since it is designed for interoperability. In practice, this means Aurelia developers can use React components by including an Aurelia custom element:
https://github.com/Vheissu/aurelia-react-example/blob/master/README.md

It also works well with Polymer, since they are both based on the WebComponents standards:
http://aurelia.io/hub.html#/doc/article/aurelia/framework/latest/integrating-with-polymer

https://github.com/aurelia/cli
The CLI helps rapid creation of projects with generators, building, deploying and hot reloads. Webpack should be coming soon.

The Aurelia community is growing at a great pace. Still doesn’t rival the big players line Angular or React, but the answer to an Aurelia issue is a quick question away on their Discourse.

With dependency injection, you can load in extra javascript and new functionality just when you need it.

This is particularly helpful with testing as you can swap out services for test services.

It also means in single page apps you can load dependencies only as you need them instead of loading them up all up at the start.

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