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. Knockout vs Relay Framework

Knockout vs Relay Framework

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Knockout
Knockout
Stacks369
Followers202
Votes6
GitHub Stars10.5K
Forks1.5K
Relay Framework
Relay Framework
Stacks214
Followers177
Votes1
GitHub Stars18.9K
Forks1.9K

Knockout vs Relay Framework: What are the differences?

What is Knockout? Create rich, responsive UIs with JavaScript. It is a JavaScript library that helps you to create rich, responsive display and editor user interfaces with a clean underlying data model. Any time you have sections of UI that update dynamically (e.g., changing depending on the user’s actions or when an external data source changes), it can help you implement it more simply and maintainably.

What is Relay Framework? A JavaScript Framework for Building Data-Driven React Applications, by Facebook. Never again communicate with your data store using an imperative API. Simply declare your data requirements using GraphQL and let Relay figure out how and when to fetch your data.

Knockout and Relay Framework can be categorized as "Javascript UI Libraries" tools.

Some of the features offered by Knockout are:

  • Easily associate DOM elements with model data using a concise, readable syntax
  • When your data model's state changes, your UI updates automatically
  • Implicitly set up chains of relationships between model data, to transform and combine it

On the other hand, Relay Framework provides the following key features:

  • Build data driven apps
  • Declarative style
  • Mutate data on the client and server

Knockout and Relay Framework are both open source tools. Relay Framework with 14.9K GitHub stars and 1.48K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Knockout with 9.84K GitHub stars and 1.55K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Knockout has a broader approval, being mentioned in 38 company stacks & 146 developers stacks; compared to Relay Framework, which is listed in 54 company stacks and 76 developer stacks.

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

Detailed Comparison

Knockout
Knockout
Relay Framework
Relay Framework

It is a JavaScript library that helps you to create rich, responsive display and editor user interfaces with a clean underlying data model. Any time you have sections of UI that update dynamically (e.g., changing depending on the user’s actions or when an external data source changes), it can help you implement it more simply and maintainably.

Never again communicate with your data store using an imperative API. Simply declare your data requirements using GraphQL and let Relay figure out how and when to fetch your data.

Easily associate DOM elements with model data using a concise, readable syntax; When your data model's state changes, your UI updates automatically; Implicitly set up chains of relationships between model data, to transform and combine it; Quickly generate sophisticated, nested UIs as a function of your model data
Build data driven apps; Declarative style; Mutate data on the client and server
Statistics
GitHub Stars
10.5K
GitHub Stars
18.9K
GitHub Forks
1.5K
GitHub Forks
1.9K
Stacks
369
Stacks
214
Followers
202
Followers
177
Votes
6
Votes
1
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 3
    Data centered application
  • 2
    Great for validations
  • 1
    Open source
Pros
  • 1
    Relay Modern
Integrations
JavaScript
JavaScript
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Knockout, Relay Framework?

jQuery

jQuery

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

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.

Riot

Riot

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

Marko

Marko

Marko is a really fast and lightweight HTML-based templating engine that compiles templates to readable Node.js-compatible JavaScript modules, and it works on the server and in the browser. It supports streaming, async rendering and custom tags.

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