Riot vs Zepto: What are the differences?

What is Riot? A React-like user interface micro-library. Riot brings custom tags to all browsers. Think React + Polymer but with enjoyable syntax and a small learning curve.

What is Zepto? Minimalist JavaScript library for modern browsers, with a jQuery-compatible API. While 100% jQuery coverage is not a design goal, the APIs provided match their jQuery counterparts. The goal is to have a ~5-10k modular library that downloads and executes fast, with a familiar and versatile API, so you can concentrate on getting stuff done.

Riot and Zepto belong to "Javascript UI Libraries" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Riot are:

• Absolutely the smallest possible amount of DOM updates and reflows.
• One way data flow: updates and unmounts are propagated downwards from parent to children.
• Expressions are pre-compiled and cached for high performance.

On the other hand, Zepto provides the following key features:

• zepto - Core module
• contains most methods
• event - Event handling via on() & off()

"Light weight. Fast. Clear" is the primary reason why developers consider Riot over the competitors, whereas "Lightweight " was stated as the key factor in picking Zepto.

Riot and Zepto are both open source tools. Zepto with 14.5K GitHub stars and 4.06K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Riot with 13.7K GitHub stars and 1.02K GitHub forks.