MEAN vs Xamarin: What are the differences?
Developers describe MEAN as "A Simple, Scalable and Easy starting point for full stack javascript web development". MEAN (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node) is a boilerplate that provides a nice starting point for MongoDB, Node.js, Express, and AngularJS based applications. It is designed to give you a quick and organized way to start developing MEAN based web apps with useful modules like Mongoose and Passport pre-bundled and configured. On the other hand, Xamarin is detailed as "Create iOS, Android and Mac apps in C#". Xamarin’s Mono-based products enable .NET developers to use their existing code, libraries and tools (including Visual Studio*), as well as skills in .NET and the C# programming language, to create mobile applications for the industry’s most widely-used mobile devices, including Android-based smartphones and tablets, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
MEAN belongs to "Frameworks (Full Stack)" category of the tech stack, while Xamarin can be primarily classified under "Cross-Platform Mobile Development".
"Javascript", "Easy" and "Nosql" are the key factors why developers consider MEAN; whereas "Power of c# on mobile devices", "Native apps with native ui controls" and "Native performance" are the primary reasons why Xamarin is favored.
MEAN is an open source tool with 11.8K GitHub stars and 3.57K GitHub forks. Here's a link to MEAN's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Xamarin has a broader approval, being mentioned in 74 company stacks & 65 developers stacks; compared to MEAN, which is listed in 37 company stacks and 24 developer stacks.