Today I've decided to check the status on various JS Frameworks: Meteor, Express, Sails.js, MeanJS, AngularJS, Backbone.js, and Ember.js.

First of all, I am aware that some of these frameworks are Frontend, while the others are Backend, and some (like Meteor & MeanJS) are full stack. I still wanted to know about their popularity compared to one another.

The results really surprised me honestly:

How did I compare? I summed the StackOverflow questions (by tag), GitHub Stars + Watches, and GitHub Forks.
That should be a pretty good indication of developers' interest in a framework.

As anyone can easily see, AngularJS is far more popular than most of these frameworks COMBINED.
My surprise came when I looked into Meteor's stats.

Last I've checked, Meteor wasn't even close to ExpressJS in user base numbers, but it really seems to be catching up, lets look a little closer (with Angular removed):

As you can see, MeteorJS is quite a dominant force, and as the only Full Stack solution with such popularity.

I've wondered what the change was in the last 12 months, so I used Google trends to find out:

Meteor seems to be getting closer and closer to Express, they were just as popular for a week there even.
I've also added ReactJS to the graph, just to show a very interesting curve happening there.

Why did ReactJS make such a big jump on January 25th? Probably because of the React.js Conf that same week.
That week Facebook made some amazing presentations that showed us the potential power of React.js.
There is a pretty steep fall happening right now though, since the conference is now over.
It's also important to note that React.js is not a full stack JS framework.

A few things I've learned from this small but interesting research:

1. Meteor seems to be dominating the Opinionated Full Stack JS framework arena
2. Meteor has solid numbers, even compared to none full stack frameworks
3. React.js EXPLODED for having its own popular conference, Meteor should do the same

Hope you find this information useful.

Until next week!