Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Backbone.js VS jsPlumb

Compare Backbone.js VS jsPlumb and see what are their differences

Backbone.js logo Backbone.js

Give your JS App some Backbone with Models, Views, Collections, and Events

jsPlumb logo jsPlumb

jsPlumb is an advanced, standards-compliant and easy to use JS library for building connectivity based applications, such as flowcharts, process flow diagrams, sequence diagrams, organisation charts, etc. More than just a diagram library.
  • Backbone.js Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30
  • jsPlumb Chatbot Builder
    Chatbot Builder //
    2025-04-23
  • jsPlumb Active Filtering
    Active Filtering //
    2025-04-23
  • jsPlumb Flowchart Builder
    Flowchart Builder //
    2025-04-23
  • jsPlumb Hello World
    Hello World //
    2025-04-23
  • jsPlumb Gantt Chart
    Gantt Chart //
    2025-04-23
  • jsPlumb Hierarchy Layout
    Hierarchy Layout //
    2025-04-23
  • jsPlumb Mindmap Builder
    Mindmap Builder //
    2025-04-23
  • jsPlumb Org Chart
    Org Chart //
    2025-04-23
  • jsPlumb Schema Builder
    Schema Builder //
    2025-04-23
  • jsPlumb Path Tracing
    Path Tracing //
    2025-04-23
  • jsPlumb Call Flow Builder
    Call Flow Builder //
    2025-04-23
  • jsPlumb Network Topology
    Network Topology //
    2025-04-23

Build connectivity quickly. Powerful and flexible library for diagramming and rich graphical front ends. JsPlumb contains everything you need to build an application with visual connectivity: pan/zoom, a minimap widget, automatic layouts, data binding, and more. Deep integration with Angular, React, Svelte and Vue.

Cut your time to market by focusing on what makes your app unique and leave the boring stuff to us.

Backbone.js features and specs

  • Lightweight
    Backbone.js is minimal and lightweight, which means it has a small footprint and adds very little overhead to your project.
  • Flexibility
    Backbone.js provides a flexible structure to developers by allowing them to build their own MVC or MVP architectures using models, views, collections, and routers.
  • Ease of Integration
    Backbone.js can be easily integrated with other libraries and frameworks, such as jQuery or underscore.js, enhancing its capabilities without much difficulty.
  • Large Community
    Backbone.js has been around for a long time, resulting in a large community and a plethora of plugins and extensions that can be leveraged.
  • Detailed Documentation
    The official site offers comprehensive documentation which includes tutorials, examples, and a detailed API reference, aiding developers to understand and utilize the library efficiently.

Possible disadvantages of Backbone.js

  • Steeper Learning Curve
    New developers might find Backbone.js difficult to learn due to its non-opinionated nature and lack of enforced structure.
  • Sparse In-Built Features
    Backbone.js provides only the basic building blocks, requiring developers to write more boilerplate code or rely on external libraries for additional functionalities.
  • Outdated
    As newer frameworks and libraries (like React, Vue, and Angular) have emerged with more robust features and better performance, Backbone.js has somewhat fallen out of favor in modern development practices.
  • Event Binding Complexity
    Managing event bindings in Backbone.js can become complex and sometimes messy in large applications, which can lead to difficult maintenance and debugging.
  • Limited Two-Way Data Binding
    Backbone.js does not provide two-way data binding out-of-the-box, unlike other frameworks such as Angular, necessitating additional code to sync views and models.

jsPlumb features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    jsPlumb provides a straightforward API that simplifies making interactive and dynamic visualizations. It's easy to understand and quick to implement for creating diagrams and flowcharts.
  • Rich Feature Set
    The library offers a wide range of features, including various endpoint and connector types, overlays, and a robust event handling system, making it versatile for different types of projects.
  • Extensive Documentation and Examples
    jsPlumb offers thorough documentation and a variety of example projects, which help developers get started and serve as a resource for troubleshooting and implementing more complex functionality.
  • Cross-Browser Compatibility
    It supports major browsers and ensures consistent behavior across different platforms, which is essential for web applications.
  • Customizable
    With its customizable options, developers can tailor the appearance and behavior of connections and components to fit the specific needs of their application.

Backbone.js videos

Introduction to Backbone.js

More videos:

  • Review - Introduction to Backbone.js
  • Review - Backbone.js Code Review w Backbone.js Mentor Jonathon

jsPlumb videos

No jsPlumb videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Backbone.js and jsPlumb)
JavaScript Framework
100 100%
0% 0
Javascript UI Libraries
77 77%
23% 23
Development
0 0%
100% 100
JS Library
100 100%
0% 0

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing Backbone.js and jsPlumb.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

jsPlumb's answer:

The flexibility and deep integration of the library is what most clients love. jsPlumb also offers also quick help and support. Wide range of features. Powerful with integration to common web frameworks. Good examples. Support for HTML & SVG.

Who are some of the biggest customers of your product?

jsPlumb's answer:

Apple, Walmart, Siemens, Oracle, Cisco, Credit Suisse.

What makes your product unique?

jsPlumb's answer:

JsPlumb is a JavaScript library that simplifies creating visual connections between elements in a web application. It is particularly popular for building applications with drag-and-drop interfaces, workflow editors, process modeling tools, or any system where you need to visualize relationships between elements.JsPlumb is designed to work seamlessly across modern browsers, ensuring that your application delivers a consistent user experience to all users.

How would you describe your primary audience?

jsPlumb's answer:

JsPlumb's primary audience consists of developers and organizations that need to create visual representations of relationships or workflows in web applications. Web Application Developers, Software Companies, Designers and Engineers of Interactive Tools, Educational and Research Platforms, Enterprises Needing Custom Solutions, Developers Needing Quick Prototyping,Data Visualization Professionals.

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Backbone.js and jsPlumb

Backbone.js Reviews

20 Next.js Alternatives Worth Considering
A veteran on the scene, Backbone.js is all about giving structure to your JavaScript-heavy applications. It’s standing the test of time, enabling you to keep your data logic and display logic neatly side by side, all while being lightweight.
9 Best JavaScript Frameworks to Use in 2023
Backbone.js is based on the Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern. The library supports seven components: Models, Views, Collections, Routers, Events, Sync, and Options. Backbone.js also provides an asynchronous communication layer that allows the application to communicate with a backend service.
Source: ninetailed.io
JavaScript: What Are The Most Used Frameworks For This Language?
Backbone.JS is a lightweight JavaScript library that provides a framework for developing structured and scalable web applications. It offers a set of tools for building client-side applications that interact with RESTful APIs. Backbone.JS is well-suited for developing single-page applications (SPAs) where most of the user interface is rendered in the browser, rather than...
Source: www.bocasay.com
20 Best JavaScript Frameworks For 2023
Backbone.js is a JavaScript-based framework that connects to an API via a RESTful JSON interface. Backbone.js is known for being small and light because it only requires jQuery and one JavaScript library, Underscore.js, to use the entire library.
Top JavaScript Frameworks For Mobile App Development
Backbone JS is a JavaScript framework based on the MVP app design. As the name suggests, it acts as a strong backbone to your project. It is lightweight in nature and hence, is considered ideal for developing single-page applications. It offers a simplistic frontend and makes the best use of JavaScript functions.
Source: medium.com

jsPlumb Reviews

20+ JavaScript libraries to draw your own diagrams (2022 edition)
jsPlumb provides a fast way of building applications with visual connectivity at their core. s. It uses SVG and runs on all browsers from IE9 and later. JsPlumbToolkit is its commercial extension. This commercial version wraps the Community edition with a focus on the underlying data model, as well as several useful UI features such as layouts, and a widget that offers...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Backbone.js should be more popular than jsPlumb. It has been mentiond 17 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Backbone.js mentions (17)

  • JavaScript Views, the Hard Way – A Pattern for Writing UI
    Https://backbonejs.org/#View There is also a github repo that has examples of MVC patterns adapted to the web platform. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • JavaScript evolution: From Lodash and Underscore to vanilla
    Underscore was created by Jeremy Ashkenas (the creator of Backbone.js) in 2009 to provide a set of utility functions that JavaScript lacked at the time. It was also created to work with Backbone.js, but it slowly became a favorite among developers who needed utility functions that they could just call and get stuff done with without having to worry about the inner implementations and browser compatibility. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • React is 10 years old
    Got it thanks for the context. I've read the web app and it seems to me it is just https://backbonejs.org/ re-written in Typescript and allows JSX. I'm very certain Typescript and JSX will have improved the DX for Backbone like apps, but it doesn't address all of the other issues that teams had with Backbone. e.g. Cyclical event propagation, state stored in the DOM (i.e. Appendchild is error prone in large code... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • Just Simply – Stop saying how simple things are in our docs
    Even further nowadays, docs are created using Docusaurus. I don't have problem with it but documentation should be good (eye) friendly than easy to write. Why not be creative while writing docs such as - Backbone.js - https://backbonejs.org Or https://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html as code annotation. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • The Emperor's New Library
    What we see, a decade ago, are that many of the "popular" libraries, frameworks, and methods, not surprisingly, have gone by the wayside, a lot that have remained in current code as difficult-to-removemodernize legacy cruft (Bower, Gulp, Grunt, Backbone, Angular 1, ...), and then we have the small minority that are still here. Some that remain have had their utility lessened/questioned by platform and language... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
View more

jsPlumb mentions (5)

  • Do you know any good libraries to make those kind of graph?
    I have looked into https://jsplumbtoolkit.com/ for a couple of projects and it seemed pretty good but it was a pure JS library 'community edition' with a commercial version that had all the nice framework integration for React and Angular. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Low-code development (Node-RED alternative)
    A pretty common one is jsPlumb - https://jsplumbtoolkit.com/ - might be what you're looking for. I'm sure there are others as well. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • Library suggestions for creating unidirectional graphs or flowcharts.
    Check out https://jsplumbtoolkit.com/. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Is there any node graph library for svelte?
    Amazing!!! I am looking specifically for something like react flow as well. After looking into it the best option might be jsplumb. Source: over 3 years ago
  • Creating a drag and drop platform with python
    Hey, finally I found https://jsplumbtoolkit.com/ who seems to be the best solution for that. Source: about 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Backbone.js and jsPlumb, you can also consider the following products

AngularJS - AngularJS lets you extend HTML vocabulary for your application. The resulting environment is extraordinarily expressive, readable, and quick to develop.

GoJS - GoJS is a JavaScript library for building interactive diagrams on HTML web pages. Build apps with flowcharts, org charts, BPMN, UML, modeling, and other visual graph types.

ExpressJS - Sinatra inspired web development framework for node.js -- insanely fast, flexible, and simple

mxGraph - mxGraph is a fully client side JavaScript diagramming library - jgraph/mxgraph

ember.js - A JavaScript framework for creating ambitious web apps

Konva - Konva is 2d Canvas JavaScript framework for drawings shapes, animations, node nesting, layering, filtering, event handling, drag and drop and much more.