MEAN vs Zend Framework: 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, Zend Framework is detailed as "An open source, object-oriented web application framework implemented in PHP 5". Zend Framework 2 is an open source framework for developing web applications and services using PHP 5.3+. Zend Framework 2 uses 100% object-oriented code and utilises most of the new features of PHP 5.3, namely namespaces, late static binding, lambda functions and closures.

MEAN and Zend Framework can be categorized 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 Zend Framework.

MEAN and Zend Framework are both open source tools. MEAN with 11.8K GitHub stars and 3.57K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Zend Framework with 5.71K GitHub stars and 2.87K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Zend Framework has a broader approval, being mentioned in 40 company stacks & 22 developers stacks; compared to MEAN, which is listed in 37 company stacks and 24 developer stacks.