StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Frameworks
  5. .NET vs MEAN

.NET vs MEAN

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

.NET
.NET
Stacks15.3K
Followers5.9K
Votes1.9K
GitHub Stars21.7K
Forks4.9K
MEAN
MEAN
Stacks337
Followers617
Votes594
GitHub Stars12.1K
Forks3.4K

.NET vs MEAN: What are the differences?

.NET is a framework developed by Microsoft, while MEAN is an acronym for MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS (now Angular), and Node.js. Let's explore the key differences between them.

  1. Technology Stack: The major difference between .NET and MEAN is their technology stack. .NET is a framework that includes various programming languages like C#, VB.NET, and F#, whereas MEAN is a full-stack JavaScript framework that runs on the JavaScript ecosystem.

  2. Programming Languages: .NET supports multiple programming languages, allowing developers to choose the language they are most comfortable with. On the other hand, MEAN is solely based on JavaScript, which means that developers must have expertise in JavaScript to work with the MEAN stack.

  3. Scalability: Another significant difference is the scalability of the frameworks. .NET is known for its scalability as it offers various tools and features to build highly scalable applications. MEAN, on the other hand, is also scalable but requires additional configuration and optimization to handle large-scale projects.

  4. Community Support: The community support for .NET and MEAN differs significantly. .NET has been around for a longer time and has a larger community with extensive documentation, forums, and resources. MEAN, being relatively newer, has a smaller community, but it is growing rapidly and has a supportive developer community.

  5. Integrated Development Environment (IDE): .NET has its own integrated development environment called Visual Studio, which provides a wide range of features like debugging, code refactoring, and integrated database tools. MEAN, being a JavaScript-based framework, can be developed using various IDEs such as Visual Studio Code, Atom, or Sublime Text, providing flexibility to developers.

  6. Platform Independence: MEAN is known for its platform independence as it can run on multiple operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux. .NET, while originally developed for Windows, now also runs on macOS and Linux, but some features may have limitations or different behavior on non-Windows platforms.

In summary, .NET is a comprehensive framework developed by Microsoft for building a variety of applications, including web, mobile, desktop, and cloud-based solutions, while MEAN is a collection of JavaScript-based technologies, including MongoDB, Express.js, Angular, and Node.js, commonly used for building modern web applications with a focus on simplicity and scalability.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on .NET, MEAN

Ing. Alvaro
Ing. Alvaro

Software Systems Engineer at Ripio

Nov 28, 2020

Decided

I was considering focusing on learning RoR and looking for a work that uses those techs.

After some investigation, I decided to stay with C# .NET:

  • It is more requested on job positions (7 to 1 in my personal searches average).

  • It's been around for longer.

  • it has better documentation and community.

  • One of Ruby advantages (its amazing community gems, that allows to quickly build parts of your systems by merely putting together third party components) gets quite complicated to use and maintain in huge applications, where building and reusing your own components may become a better approach.

  • Rail's front end support is starting to waver.

  • C# .NET code is far easier to understand, debug and maintain. Although certainly not easier to learn from scratch.

  • Though Rails has an excellent programming speed, C# tends to get the upper hand in long term projects.

I would avise to stick to rails when building small projects, and switching to C# for more long term ones.

Opinions are welcome!

399k views399k
Comments
Ing. Alvaro
Ing. Alvaro

Software Systems Engineer at Ripio

May 21, 2020

Decided

Decided to change all my stack to microsoft technologies for they behave just great together. It is very easy to set up and deploy projects using visual studio and azure. Visual studio is also an amazing IDE, if not the best, when used for C#, it allows you to work in every aspect of your software.

Visual studio templates for ASP.NET MVC are the best I've found compared to django, rails, laravel, and others.

524k views524k
Comments
Noe
Noe

Software Engineer

Aug 13, 2021

Decided

Node Js have worked incredible great for me on every project I had. It is fast enough to support big and small apps, you do not have to worry about performance, because it is very capable of building a big REST API.

One advantage is that the learning curve is lower when you have used javascript on web browser as frontend, so, it is easy to migrate from Frontend to Backend with node.

Node Package Manager (NPM) has an incredible amount of packages from many developers, so you can use them on your project as you need them.

Code is easy to support, way different than Java Legacy code.

114k views114k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

.NET
.NET
MEAN
MEAN

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

MEAN (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node) is a boilerplate that provides a nice starting point for MongoDB, Node.js, Express, and AngularJS based applications. It is designed to give you a quick and organized way to start developing MEAN based web apps with useful modules like Mongoose and Passport pre-bundled and configured.

Multiple languages: You can write .NET apps in C#, F#, or Visual Basic.; Cross Platform: Whether you're working in C#, F#, or Visual Basic, your code will run natively on any compatible OS.; Consistent API & Libraries: To extend functionality, Microsoft and others maintain a healthy package ecosystem built on .NET Standard.; Application models for web, mobile, games and more: You can build many types of apps with .NET. Some are cross-platform, and some target a specific OS or .NET implementation.; Choose your tools: The Visual Studio product family provides a great .NET development experience on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Or if you prefer, there are .NET command line tools and plugins.
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
21.7K
GitHub Stars
12.1K
GitHub Forks
4.9K
GitHub Forks
3.4K
Stacks
15.3K
Stacks
337
Followers
5.9K
Followers
617
Votes
1.9K
Votes
594
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 273
    Tight integration with visual studio
  • 262
    Stable code
  • 191
    Great community
  • 184
    Reliable and strongly typed server side language.
  • 141
    Microsoft
Cons
  • 13
    C#
  • 12
    Too expensive to deploy and maintain
  • 8
    Microsoft dependable systems
  • 8
    Microsoft itself
  • 5
    Hard learning curve
Pros
  • 86
    Javascript
  • 62
    Easy
  • 58
    Nosql
  • 52
    Great community
  • 50
    Mongoose
Integrations
C#
C#
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
F#
F#
Xamarin
Xamarin
Visual Basic
Visual Basic
MongoDB
MongoDB
Node.js
Node.js
ExpressJS
ExpressJS
AngularJS
AngularJS

What are some alternatives to .NET, MEAN?

Node.js

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Rails

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Django

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Laravel

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

Symfony

Symfony

It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..

Spring

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.

Android SDK

Android SDK

Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.

Phoenix Framework

Phoenix Framework

Phoenix is a framework for building HTML5 apps, API backends and distributed systems. Written in Elixir, you get beautiful syntax, productive tooling and a fast runtime.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase