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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Microframeworks
  4. Microframeworks
  5. ExpressJS vs Mithril

ExpressJS vs Mithril

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

ExpressJS
ExpressJS
Stacks35.1K
Followers24.0K
Votes1.6K
Mithril
Mithril
Stacks89
Followers79
Votes86

ExpressJS vs Mithril: What are the differences?

ExpressJS: Sinatra inspired web development framework for node.js -- insanely fast, flexible, and simple. Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications; Mithril: Client-side MVC framework - a tool to organize code in a way that is easy to think about and to maintain. Mithril is around 12kb gzipped thanks to its small, focused, API. It provides a templating engine with a virtual DOM diff implementation for performant rendering, utilities for high-level modelling via functional composition, as well as support for routing and componentization.

ExpressJS and Mithril are primarily classified as "Microframeworks (Backend)" and "Javascript MVC Frameworks" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by ExpressJS are:

  • Robust routing
  • HTTP helpers (redirection, caching, etc)
  • View system supporting 14+ template engines

On the other hand, Mithril provides the following key features:

  • Only 12kb gzipped, no dependencies
  • Small API, small learning curve
  • Safe-by-default templates

"Simple" is the primary reason why developers consider ExpressJS over the competitors, whereas "Lightweight" was stated as the key factor in picking Mithril.

ExpressJS and Mithril are both open source tools. It seems that ExpressJS with 44.6K GitHub stars and 7.48K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Mithril with 11.3K GitHub stars and 863 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, ExpressJS has a broader approval, being mentioned in 854 company stacks & 789 developers stacks; compared to Mithril, which is listed in 5 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

ExpressJS
ExpressJS
Mithril
Mithril

Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications.

Mithril is around 12kb gzipped thanks to its small, focused, API. It provides a templating engine with a virtual DOM diff implementation for performant rendering, utilities for high-level modelling via functional composition, as well as support for routing and componentization.

Robust routing;HTTP helpers (redirection, caching, etc);View system supporting 14+ template engines;Content negotiation;Focus on high performance;Executable for generating applications quickly;High test coverage
Only 12kb gzipped, no dependencies;Small API, small learning curve;Safe-by-default templates;Hierarchical MVC via components;Virtual DOM diffing and compilable templates;Intelligent auto-redrawing system
Statistics
Stacks
35.1K
Stacks
89
Followers
24.0K
Followers
79
Votes
1.6K
Votes
86
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 381
    Simple
  • 336
    Node.js
  • 244
    Javascript
  • 193
    High performance
  • 152
    Robust routing
Cons
  • 27
    Not python
  • 17
    Overrated
  • 14
    No multithreading
  • 9
    Javascript
  • 5
    Not fast
Pros
  • 16
    Lightweight
  • 12
    Faster than React
  • 10
    Pure JavaScript
  • 10
    Virtual Dom
  • 8
    Robust
Cons
  • 1
    Virtual Dom
Integrations
Node.js
Node.js
TypeScript
TypeScript
JavaScript
JavaScript

What are some alternatives to ExpressJS, Mithril?

AngularJS

AngularJS

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

Vue.js

Vue.js

It is a library for building interactive web interfaces. It provides data-reactive components with a simple and flexible API.

Ember.js

Ember.js

A JavaScript framework that does all of the heavy lifting that you'd normally have to do by hand. There are tasks that are common to every web app; It does those things for you, so you can focus on building killer features and UI.

Backbone.js

Backbone.js

Backbone supplies structure to JavaScript-heavy applications by providing models key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing application over a RESTful JSON interface.

Angular

Angular

It is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework. It is a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications.

Aurelia

Aurelia

Aurelia is a next generation JavaScript client framework that leverages simple conventions to empower your creativity.

Django REST framework

Django REST framework

It is a powerful and flexible toolkit that makes it easy to build Web APIs.

Sails.js

Sails.js

Sails is designed to mimic the MVC pattern of frameworks like Ruby on Rails, but with support for the requirements of modern apps: data-driven APIs with scalable, service-oriented architecture.

Sinatra

Sinatra

Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort.

Lumen

Lumen

Laravel Lumen is a stunningly fast PHP micro-framework for building web applications with expressive, elegant syntax. We believe development must be an enjoyable, creative experience to be truly fulfilling. Lumen attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as routing, database abstraction, queueing, and caching.

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