Angular Universal vs Polymer: What are the differences?

What is Angular Universal? A technology that renders Angular applications on the server. It executes on the server, generating static application pages that later get bootstrapped on the client. This means that the application generally renders more quickly, giving users a chance to view the application layout before it becomes fully interactive.

What is Polymer? A new library built on top of Web Components, designed to leverage the evolving web platform on modern browsers. Polymer is a new type of library for the web, designed to leverage the existing browser infrastructure to provide the encapsulation and extendability currently only available in JS libraries. Polymer is based on a set of future technologies, including Shadow DOM, Custom Elements and Model Driven Views. Currently these technologies are implemented as polyfills or shims, but as browsers adopt these features natively, the platform code that drives Polymer evacipates, leaving only the value-adds.

Angular Universal can be classified as a tool in the "JavaScript Framework Components" category, while Polymer is grouped under "Front-End Frameworks".

Angular Universal and Polymer are both open source tools. Angular Universal with 50.1K GitHub stars and 13.9K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Polymer with 21.1K GitHub stars and 2.01K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Polymer has a broader approval, being mentioned in 59 company stacks & 240 developers stacks; compared to Angular Universal, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 10 developer stacks.