Meteor Reviews & Product Details

It's easy to learn and customize. Interestingly, on both the front and the back end we need only use one word. Good support from the family. It's easy to learn Meteor Framework, build in a unique language, and let me create more with less effort. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

With SQL, it doesn't work well. The user community isn't too large, so I have found it difficult to find resources and content that were so necessary to address the problem. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Meteor makes it easy to build real-time applications, it has a large community with many custom packages. It supports the use of NPM packages as well. There are plenty of tutorials and posts covering a wide variety of topics. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Meteor's package system can be an impediment sometimes, but this is usually mitigated through the use of the appropriate NPM equivalent. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Meteor is a framework that allows the rapid development of applications, which can be deployed on the dominant platforms (web, ios, android). Its integration with MongoDB facilitates data storage and uses Distributed Data Protocol and a publish-subscribe pattern to automatically send any changes to the client without the need for the developer to write some synchronization code or client refresh. In the client, Meteor depends on jQuery and can be used with any library for graphical interfaces with JavaScript. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Being based on Node.js, we depend that it is installed on the server computer for its operation, therefore, applications made with Meteor can not be deployed on traditional web servers. This increases operating and commissioning costs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Meteor provides an easy to setup full stack development framework.

Developers can choose what to use for front-end development: from Meteor native Blaze view layer to Angular and React.

Samples and tutorials provide a good base to get started in minutes.

Included support for Cordova enables building apps for both iOS and Android. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Developers need to take in account there is heavy ongoing development on several opensource projects included in this framework.

For market-ready products some time must be dedicated to review and assesment of utilized opensource modules.

Even if Meteor can be installed on Windows keep in mind that Windows PCs are still handicapped for modern full-stack developmnet.

Enterprise requirements for RDBMS can represent some blocking issues, but this should get improved with Apollo stack as the data stack for modern apps.

Support for Electron.js to buld desktop apps could be another plus for the Meteor framework. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

With Meteor you can develop full stack application very easily in minutes. Seriously, if you are interested in developing a Web Application with Javascript-MongoDB, Meteor is your framework to go. The Meteor community is amazing, and the support is very good. Meteor also comes with React support. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The flexibility to switch databases.

The tutorials, probably are not clear enough. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ease of configuration, especially since the introduction of native NPM modules in 1.3. Definitely a nice change from having to take the time to wrap the packages. Ease of OAuth configuration is also an absolute pleasure. Having Mongo as the DB is great for the number of projects I do which rely heavily on GTFS/geospacial data - combined with meteors reactivity, it can speed up development time on these projects immensely. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The direction MDG is taking Meteor - particularly in the scrapping plans for Postgres support in favour of GraphQL. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Fast and easy to get started. I can implement new features and make changes to my existing code base very quickly. Meteor is very opinionated, but because it was built on nodejs, you have the entire catalog of NPM at your fingertips.

Meteor is also incredibly easy to learn.

It's an SPA framework, so it shifts a lot of the computational power away from my server and onto my user's device. This is great because I can spin up a tiny VM and still serve plenty of users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's too closely tied to mongodb. I could use npm to import other db drivers like postgres, but I would lose a lot of the native support for mongodb that meteor baked in (e.g. minimongo on the client, meteor accounts, etc.).

Some people don't like Blaze (the reactive front-end templating system that comes with Meteor), but I personally love it. Also, meteor does integrate well with angular and react.

It's a bit of a memory hog. An idle server requires 200-300mb of RAM. Furthermore, you need to be careful what you "publish/subscribe". My understanding is that anything you "publish" from your server gets put into RAM, so if you have a lot of users who are subscribing, you'll quickly blow through the memory on your server.

The phonegap integration is great, but it's done some handwaving to achieve the appearance of a native integration. When you run into a problem, you have to learn "the Meteor way of doing things" to fix your problem rather than relying on the plethora of phonegap build solutions you can easily find on stackoverflow. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The best feature of Meteor is hands down the triple-binding it offers by default. Where other frameworks have two-way binding between the views and their controllers (in this case html files and JS logic), Meteor takes this one step further and allows you to bind views, controllers, and datastores. Essentially this boils down to saving database queries to a variable.

In practice you might have an information store. In Meteor you can say "var x = my_datastore.fetch_contents()" This variable is now bound between the controller and the mongo database in Meteor such that they are always in sync. Further, if you make x editable by the client through the view Meteor handles a lot of basic state saving to keep all three in sync. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not a good tool for rapid prototyping. Every change can take seconds to tens of seconds to reload. Further the native templating language is horrible. UI work with basic Meteor is painful and cumbersome. Thankfully Meteor allows the user to choose a UI framework of their choice. I would definitely recommend dropping the native blaze templating methodology in favor of something like React or AngularJS. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1.) Batteries-included data stack. No need to implement custom realtime synchronization or handle optimistic updates yourself, Meteor uses it's Livedata Protocol to offer a hassle-free realtime data solution that relies on MongoDB for data storage.

2.) JavaScript like it's supposed to be. With Meteor 1.3 and it's NPM integration, there's now absolutely no overhead to using the popular package manager, thus allowing all JavaScript libraries to be used on the server as well as the client side. No need for a configuration-heavy alternative like Webpack.

3.) Not Only Rapid Development. Although Meteor is the go-to framework for prototyping since it's very easy to get started with development and there's no need for much boilerplate, the platform goes a step further to ensure that your applications can be made future-proof, with many guidelines driven by the community and native testing support coming in Meteor 1.3.

4.) Backwards-Compatible Updates. Even though the platform is rapidly evolving, the developers always take good care of applications written for previous versions. This means that you can start writing your app today and even though the platform most probably will change certain preferences in terms of what the default view layers, data stacks, etc. should be, your applications that rely on the previous technologies will continue to work just fine in years to come. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1.) Rapid Evolvement. The platform evolves so quickly that Meteor apps from one year ago look completely different and new applications follow entirely different guidelines, which can result in difficult decisions in terms of what technologies to rely on and whether or not you want to go through the hassle of changing in order to go with the currently suggested stack. However, this issue is mitigated somewhat by the fact that no matter what technologies you go for, Meteor always makes sure that it stays backwards-compatible so you can be sure that it will continue to work.

2.) Enforced Realtime. Currently (as of Meteor 1.3) there's no way to make realtime data selective and turn it off for certain pages, i.e. if you'd like to create a more static experience and live data synchronization is not really a priority for you, Meteor doesn't provide a guideline for how you would handle that situation. This can be an issue in terms of scalability, as continuous connections cost a lot more than the good old request-response model. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Meteor gives you everything you'd need normally need on a development platform based on Javascript, here are some of my favorite features:

1) It has already auto implemented a live reload feature, so if you make a change on your html, javascript or even css code it'll automatically update the page and show you the changes, something like nodemon package or browser sync.

2) you will never have to point/require code files, static files, or files in general because meteor auto detects what is new in your app, if something changes it'll automatically include it in your app ready to be used without passing a single line of code, like an image, css files, html...

3) Meteor uses reactivity for almost everything (if not everything) on your age, so your code and app changes are reflected in real time, if you don't understand this you can think about it like sockets.

4) You can render js code easily only for selected templates without executing it in all of them, I mean, for example, you can pass a function in jquery and use it in only one template/route by calling a function like Template.mytemplate.rendered and this will automatically call the code for that template only an not all the scope, it's possible without meteor too, but I have to admit it's really easy and cleaner.

5) it has implemented handlebars with spacebars, but you can coustomize your frontend with angular or react without major problems.

6)A great commmunity, meteor has atmospherejs a great site where people upload packages ready to be used in meteor, and this is something that I love because you find almost everything herel, it has around 10.000 packages.

7 Straight to the point, when you want to start a new project you can do it by using the meteor create command and it'll give you everything ready to start coding (I'm not lying) you literally start making your app code after creating your project without configuring anything else.

8) Scalability is just amazing with meteor.

if you liked what you read until now, there are a lot of really cool features about meteor that you can find in their official website. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some things I don't like that much about meteor are:

1) Meteor is "relatively new", it's no precisely a bad thing but it's something you can find a little bit counterproductive, why? because some tiny problems are not yet solved in stack overflow for example and you'll have to figure a way to solve it on your own (but let's face it we are programmers so we deal with this kind of situations everyday)

2) It uses a mongodb version (mini-version if I'm not wrong) included by default, if you want to use another database it's possible but sacrifices a couple of features, like reactivity in some ways, so it's something you have to take in count when developing your project structure.

3) The livereload feature can be a little be slow when you are developing (I'm not sure if it's based on your computer specs, I have an i3 PC and i5 Laptop and the performance is pretty much the same in both of them) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.