Espresso.js vs Mithril: What are the differences?

Developers describe Espresso.js as "React Meets Backbone for a Minimal MVC". Espresso.js is a tiny MVC framework inspired by Backbone and React with a focus on simplicity and speed. We've aimed to bring the ideas of unidirectional data flow of Flux to a simple, Backbone-style library. On the other hand, Mithril is detailed as "Client-side MVC framework - a tool to organize code in a way that is easy to think about and to maintain". Mithril is around 12kb gzipped thanks to its small, focused, API. It provides a templating engine with a virtual DOM diff implementation for performant rendering, utilities for high-level modelling via functional composition, as well as support for routing and componentization.

Espresso.js and Mithril can be primarily classified as "Javascript MVC Frameworks" tools.

Some of the features offered by Espresso.js are:

• tiny, less than 500 lines and 3kb gzipped
• zero dependencies
• performance and memory focused

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

• Only 12kb gzipped, no dependencies
• Small API, small learning curve
• Safe-by-default templates

Espresso.js and Mithril are both open source tools. Mithril with 11.3K GitHub stars and 863 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Espresso.js with 523 GitHub stars and 20 GitHub forks.