JavaScript vs Node.js: What are the differences?
What is JavaScript? Lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions. JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
What is 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.
JavaScript and Node.js are primarily classified as "Languages" and "Frameworks (Full Stack)" tools respectively.
"Can be used on frontend/backend", "It's everywhere" and "Lots of great frameworks" are the key factors why developers consider JavaScript; whereas "Npm", "Javascript" and "Great libraries" are the primary reasons why Node.js is favored.
Node.js is an open source tool with 35.5K GitHub stars and 7.78K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Node.js's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, JavaScript has a broader approval, being mentioned in 5086 company stacks & 6486 developers stacks; compared to Node.js, which is listed in 4104 company stacks and 4042 developer stacks.