Go vs Node.js: What are the differences?

Go: An open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language; Node.js: A platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. 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.

Go belongs to "Languages" category of the tech stack, while Node.js can be primarily classified under "Frameworks (Full Stack)".

"High-performance", "Simple, minimal syntax" and "Fun to write" are the key factors why developers consider Go; whereas "Npm", "Javascript" and "Great libraries" are the primary reasons why Node.js is favored.

Go and Node.js are both open source tools. Go with 60.5K GitHub stars and 8.37K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Node.js with 35.5K GitHub stars and 7.78K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Node.js has a broader approval, being mentioned in 4104 company stacks & 4039 developers stacks; compared to Go, which is listed in 903 company stacks and 609 developer stacks.