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. Business Tools
  3. UI Components
  4. Javascript UI Libraries
  5. Underscore vs jQuery

Underscore vs jQuery

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

jQuery
jQuery
Stacks195.3K
Followers70.6K
Votes6.6K
GitHub Stars59.6K
Forks20.5K
Underscore
Underscore
Stacks1.9K
Followers589
Votes290
GitHub Stars27.4K
Forks5.5K

Underscore vs jQuery: What are the differences?

## Introduction
In web development, both Underscore and jQuery are popular JavaScript libraries that aid in simplifying and enhancing coding tasks. However, they have key differences that set them apart from each other.

1. **Syntax**: Underscore uses a functional programming syntax, making it more suitable for developers familiar with functional programming concepts. On the other hand, jQuery employs a more imperative approach, making it accessible to developers with varying programming backgrounds.
2. **File Size**: Underscore is smaller in size compared to jQuery, making it a more lightweight option for projects that require minimal library resources.
3. **API Design**: Underscore focuses on providing utility functions for common tasks like manipulating arrays, objects, and functions. In contrast, jQuery primarily concentrates on DOM manipulation and event handling, making it particularly useful for interactive web applications.
4. **Dependencies**: Underscore has no external dependencies, which means it can be easily integrated into projects without worrying about conflicting dependencies. In contrast, jQuery has a few dependencies, such as Sizzle for selector engine, which may require additional management.
5. **Community Support**: jQuery has a larger and more established community compared to Underscore. This means that there are more resources, plugins, and documentation available for developers using jQuery, making it easier to find solutions and assistance when needed.
6. **Browser Compatibility**: jQuery is well-known for its compatibility with older browsers, ensuring that web applications built with jQuery function correctly across a wide range of browsers. Underscore might not provide the same level of seamless compatibility with older browsers.

In Summary, Underscore and jQuery have distinct differences in terms of syntax, file size, API design, dependencies, community support, and browser compatibility, making them suitable for different types of web development projects.

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 jQuery, Underscore

Malek
Malek

Web developer at Quicktext

Mar 28, 2020

Decided

The project is a web gadget previously made using vanilla script and JQuery, It is a part of the "Quicktext" platform and offers an in-app live & customizable messaging widget. We made that remake with React eco-system and Typescript and we're so far happy with results. We gained tons of TS features, React scaling & re-usabilities capabilities and much more!

What do you think?

244k views244k
Comments
kazi
kazi

CTO at Blubird Interactive Ltd.

Mar 11, 2020

Decided

I've an eCommerce platform building using Laravel, MySQL and jQuery. It's working good and if anyone become interested, I just deploy the entire source cod e in environment / Hosting. This is not a good model of course. Because everyone ask for small or large amount of change and I had to do this. Imagine when there will be 100 separate deploy and I had to manage 100 separate source.
So How do I make my system architecture so that I'll have a core / base source code. To make any any change / update on specific deployment, it will be theme / plugin / extension based . Also if I introduce an API layer then I could handle the Web, Mobile App and POS as well ? Is the API should be part of source code or a individual single API and all the deployment will use that API ?

115k views115k
Comments
Abigail
Abigail

Dec 6, 2019

Decided

Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) provides standard data objects in JSON format for the healthcare industry. Since JSON objects are hierarchical and tree-like, we had a need to defensively 'pluck' fields from our JSON objects and do lots of mapping. We tried jQuery and Underscore and a few other technologies like FHIRPath; but Lodash has been the most well supported, works in the most contexts, has the cleanest syntax, etc. We particularly like the ES6 version of Lodash, where we can import the method names directly, without resorting to * or _ syntax. We got hooked on the 'get' function to defensively pluck fields from objects without crashing our user interface, and have found countless uses for the other lodash functions throughout our apps. Lodash is great for developing and optimizing algorithms.

38.3k views38.3k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

jQuery
jQuery
Underscore
Underscore

jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.

A JavaScript library that provides a whole mess of useful functional programming helpers without extending any built-in objects.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
59.6K
GitHub Stars
27.4K
GitHub Forks
20.5K
GitHub Forks
5.5K
Stacks
195.3K
Stacks
1.9K
Followers
70.6K
Followers
589
Votes
6.6K
Votes
290
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 1263
    Cross-browser
  • 957
    Dom manipulation
  • 809
    Power
  • 660
    Open source
  • 610
    Plugins
Cons
  • 6
    Large size
  • 5
    Sometimes inconsistent API
  • 5
    Encourages DOM as primary data source
  • 2
    Live events is overly complex feature
Pros
  • 85
    Utility
  • 55
    Simple
  • 40
    Functional programming
  • 32
    Fast
  • 28
    Open source

What are some alternatives to jQuery, Underscore?

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.

React

React

Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.

Vue.js

Vue.js

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

jQuery UI

jQuery UI

Whether you're building highly interactive web applications or you just need to add a date picker to a form control, jQuery UI is the perfect choice.

Svelte

Svelte

If you've ever built a JavaScript application, the chances are you've encountered – or at least heard of – frameworks like React, Angular, Vue and Ractive. Like Svelte, these tools all share a goal of making it easy to build slick interactive user interfaces. Rather than interpreting your application code at run time, your app is converted into ideal JavaScript at build time. That means you don't pay the performance cost of the framework's abstractions, or incur a penalty when your app first loads.

Flux

Flux

Flux is the application architecture that Facebook uses for building client-side web applications. It complements React's composable view components by utilizing a unidirectional data flow. It's more of a pattern rather than a formal framework, and you can start using Flux immediately without a lot of new code.

Famo.us

Famo.us

Famo.us is a free and open source JavaScript platform for building mobile apps and desktop experiences. What makes Famo.us unique is its JavaScript rendering engine and 3D physics engine that gives developers the power and tools to build native quality apps and animations using pure JavaScript.

Deno

Deno

It is a secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript built with V8, Rust, and Tokio.

Riot

Riot

Riot brings custom tags to all browsers. Think React + Polymer but with enjoyable syntax and a small learning curve.

Chart.js

Chart.js

Visualize your data in 6 different ways. Each of them animated, with a load of customisation options and interactivity extensions.

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