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Shiny VS Node.js

Compare Shiny VS Node.js and see what are their differences

Shiny logo Shiny

Shiny is an R package that makes it easy to build interactive web apps straight from R.

Node.js logo Node.js

Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications
  • Shiny Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-30
  • Node.js Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-18

Shiny features and specs

  • Interactive Web Applications
    Shiny allows for the creation of interactive web applications directly from R, facilitating dynamic data visualization and user engagement without requiring extensive web development knowledge.
  • Ease of Use
    Shiny provides a high-level interface that allows users to create complex applications with minimal code, leveraging R's capabilities and intuitive declarative syntax.
  • Integration with R
    As a product of Posit (formerly RStudio), Shiny seamlessly integrates with the R ecosystem, enabling users to incorporate statistical analysis and machine learning models into their web applications.
  • Customizable UI
    Shiny offers a range of UI components and the ability to integrate custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, allowing for highly customized and polished web applications.
  • Reactive Programming
    Shiny’s reactive programming model simplifies the process of building interactive applications by automatically updating output whenever input changes, reducing the need for manual event handling.
  • Community Support
    Shiny has a large and active community, offering plentiful resources such as tutorials, examples, and forums for troubleshooting and learning.

Possible disadvantages of Shiny

  • Performance
    Shiny applications may suffer from performance issues, especially with large datasets or complex operations, as R is single-threaded by nature and may not handle high concurrency well.
  • Scalability
    Scaling Shiny applications to handle large numbers of users can be challenging and may require additional infrastructure, such as Docker containers or server clusters, and careful resource management.
  • Limited Language Support
    Shiny primarily supports R, which may be a limitation for teams or projects that rely on other languages for data analysis or web development.
  • Learning Curve
    Despite its user-friendly design, there is still a learning curve for users new to R or web development concepts, particularly when dealing with more advanced features or customizations.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing dependencies and ensuring version compatibility can become complex, particularly as applications grow in size and sophistication.
  • Deployment Complexity
    Deploying Shiny applications for production use can be complex, requiring knowledge of server environments, containerization, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices.

Node.js features and specs

  • Asynchronous and Event-Driven
    Node.js uses an asynchronous, non-blocking, and event-driven I/O model, making it efficient and scalable for handling multiple simultaneous connections.
  • JavaScript Everywhere
    Developers can use JavaScript for both client-side and server-side programming, providing a unified language environment and better synergy between front-end and back-end development.
  • Large Community and NPM
    Node.js has a vibrant community and a rich ecosystem with the Node Package Manager (NPM), which offers thousands of open-source libraries and tools that can be integrated easily into projects.
  • High Performance
    Built on the V8 JavaScript engine from Google, Node.js translates JavaScript directly into native machine code, which increases performance and speed.
  • Scalability
    Designed with microservices and scalability in mind, Node.js enables easy horizontal scaling across multiple servers.
  • JSON Support
    Node.js seamlessly handles JSON, which is a common format for API responses, making it an excellent choice for building RESTful APIs and data-intensive real-time applications.

Possible disadvantages of Node.js

  • Callback Hell
    The reliance on callbacks to manage asynchronous operations can lead to deeply nested and difficult-to-read code, commonly referred to as 'Callback Hell'.
  • Not Suitable for CPU-Intensive Tasks
    Node.js is optimized for I/O operations and can become inefficient for CPU-intensive tasks, slowing down overall performance due to its single-threaded event loop.
  • Immaturity of Tools
    Compared to more established technologies, some Node.js libraries and tools still lack maturity and comprehensive documentation, which can be challenging for developers.
  • Callback and Promise Overheads
    Managing asynchronous operations using callbacks or promises can lead to additional complexity and overhead, impacting maintainability and performance if not handled correctly.
  • Fragmented Ecosystem
    The fast-paced evolution of Node.js and its ecosystem can lead to fragmentation, with numerous versions and libraries that may not always be compatible with each other.
  • Security Issues
    The extensive use of third-party libraries via NPM can introduce security vulnerabilities if not properly managed and updated, making applications more susceptible to attacks.

Shiny videos

SHINY - PS4 REVIEW

More videos:

  • Review - My Opinion on EVERY Shiny Pokémon [Generation 1 to 7]
  • Review - Review: Shiny (PlayStation 4) - Defunct Games
  • Tutorial - R Shiny Overview & Tutorial

Node.js videos

What is Node.js? | Mosh

More videos:

  • Review - What is Node.js Exactly? - a beginners introduction to Nodejs
  • Review - Learn node.js in 2020 - A review of best node.js courses

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Shiny and Node.js)
Web Frameworks
25 25%
75% 75
Developer Tools
9 9%
91% 91
Runtime
0 0%
100% 100
Python Web Framework
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

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

Shiny Reviews

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Node.js Reviews

Top JavaScript Frameworks in 2025
JavaScript is widely used for back-end or server-side development because it makes a call to the remote server when a web page loads on the browser. When a browser loads a web page, it makes a call to a remote server. Further, the code parses the page’s URL to understand users’ requirements before retrieving and transforming the required data to serve back to the browser....
Source: solguruz.com
9 Best JavaScript Frameworks to Use in 2023
Node.js applications are written in JavaScript and run on the Node.js runtime, which allows them to be executed on any platform that supports Node.js. Node.js applications are typically event-driven and single-threaded, making them efficient and scalable. Additionally, the Node Package Manager (NPM) provides a way to install and manage dependencies for Node.js projects...
Source: ninetailed.io
20 Best JavaScript Frameworks For 2023
TJ Holowaychuk built Express in 2010 before being acquired by IBM (StrongLoop) in 2015. Node.js Foundation currently maintains it. The key reason Express is one of the best JavaScript frameworks is its rapid server-side coding. Complex tasks that would take hours to code using pure Node.js can be resolved in a few minutes, thanks to Express. On top of that, Express offers a...
FOSS | Top 15 Web Servers 2021
Node.js is a cross-platform server-side JavaScript environment built for developing and running network applications such as web servers. Node.js is licensed under a variety of licenses. As of March 2021, around 1.2% of applications were running on Node.js. Among the top companies and applications utilizing this modern web server are GoDaddy, Microsoft, General Electric,...
Source: www.zentao.pm
10 Best Tools to Develop Cross-Platform Desktop Apps 
Electron.js is compatible with a variety of frameworks, libraries, access to hardware-level APIs and chromium engine, and Node.js support. Electron Fiddle feature is great for experimentation as it allows developers to play around with concepts and templates. Simplification is at the center of Electron because developers don’t have to spend unnecessary time on the packaging,...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Node.js seems to be a lot more popular than Shiny. While we know about 896 links to Node.js, we've tracked only 34 mentions of Shiny. 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.

Shiny mentions (34)

  • Big Book of R
    There is a lot of way and the most common is shiny (https://shiny.posit.co/) but with a biais towards data app. Not having a Django-like or others web stack python may have talks more about the users of R than the language per se. Its background was to replace S which was a proprietary statistics language not to enter competition with Perl used in CGI and early web. R is very powerful and is Lisp in disguise... - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • React for R
    In R, you can build Single Page Applications with Shiny, created by Posit https://shiny.posit.co/ It is very useful, if you don't know HTML,JS,CSS and want to create an interactive dashboard, showcasing your analysis, models, visualizations, or even to create an internal tool for your organization. It seems that reactR provides functions for building react components directly from R that can be used in Shiny apps. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • R: Introduction to Data Science
    A lighterweight alternative to renv is to use Posit Public Package Manage (https://packagemanager.posit.co/) with a pinned date. That doesn't help if you're installing packages from a mix of places, but if you're only using CRAN packages it lets you get everything as of a fixed date. And of course on the web side you have shiny (https://shiny.posit.co), which now also comes in a python flavour. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Reflex – Web apps in pure Python
    Sometimes the war is lost even before the battle begins. During grad school, I wrote a whole bunch of web apps entirely in R using Shiny. It was clunky as hell, but yeah, it worked. I went looking for what's up with Shiny these days and found this - https://shiny.posit.co/ So yeah, full on pivot into python. Pip install shiny. Alright! "No web development skills required. Develop web apps entirely in R I mean... - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • PSA: You don't need fancy stuff to do good work.
    Python's pandas, NumPy, and SciPy libraries offer powerful functionality for data manipulation, while matplotlib, seaborn, and plotly provide versatile tools for creating visualizations. Similarly, in R, you can use dplyr, tidyverse, and data.table for data manipulation, and ggplot2, lattice, and shiny for visualization. These packages enable you to create insightful visualizations and perform statistical analyses... Source: about 2 years ago
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Node.js mentions (896)

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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Shiny and Node.js, you can also consider the following products

Django - The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines

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

Ruby on Rails - Ruby on Rails is an open source full-stack web application framework for the Ruby programming...

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Laravel - A PHP Framework For Web Artisans

Meteor - Meteor is a set of new technologies for building top-quality web apps in a fraction of the time.