MEAN vs Yii: What are the differences?
MEAN: 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; Yii: A high-performance PHP framework best for developing Web 2.0 applications. Yii comes with: MVC, DAO/ActiveRecord, I18N/L10N, caching, authentication and role-based access control, scaffolding, testing, etc. It can reduce your development time significantly.
MEAN and Yii can be primarily classified as "Frameworks (Full Stack)" tools.
"Javascript" is the primary reason why developers consider MEAN over the competitors, whereas "Open source" was stated as the key factor in picking Yii.
MEAN and Yii are both open source tools. It seems that MEAN with 11.8K GitHub stars and 3.57K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Yii with 4.86K GitHub stars and 2.22K GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Yii has a broader approval, being mentioned in 58 company stacks & 32 developers stacks; compared to MEAN, which is listed in 37 company stacks and 24 developer stacks.