Preface: Not a Meteor Expert. Please comment with improvements.
Paraphrasing philosophy:
- Hoodie, Look ma! No Backend.
- Meteor, Backend Power on the Fronend.
A couple of high-level observations:
- Hoodie empowers UI/UX people to build full apps without any backend experience or backend experts.
- Meteor empowers developers build apps faster.
- Hoodie focusses on frontend APIs that are hooked up to a generic backend.
- Meteor brings backend APIs to the browser.
- Hoodie is offline-by-default and mobile friendly by treating in-browser-storage as a first class citizen and using asynchrnous, on-demand data exchange, that is real-time when network is available.
- Meteor focusses on always-on real-time networking between client and server.
- Hoodie stops shy of where jQuery, Backbone, Ember, Angluar and friends start. You can pick your preferred frontend stack.
- Meteor comes with a frontend framework. (might be compatible with others, lacking expertise here)
- Hoodie uses CouchDB in the backend for data reliablity and sync.
- Meteor uses MongoDB.
- Hoodie uses NPM for modules.
- Meteor has a custom package manager.
- Meteor has been public for about a year, with a great community, VC funding and all.
- Hoodie is newer and still in developer-preview, but starting to attract interest, contributors and some sustainable business already.
Similarities
- Open Source Licenses: MIT (Meteor), Apache 2.0 (Hoodie).
- Full JS Stack, browser in the front, Node.js in the back.
- Fast prototyping of apps.
I'm giving hoodie a shot on a new project because it is built on top of projects that I am familiar with (node.js, npm, couchdb) in a way that doesn't abstract away any of the underlying communities. Instead of forking a community and building their own, hoodie is building on top of existing successful open source projects in an additive way. It's hard to express the business value of these decisions, and caring about them probably makes me look like every other beardy open source programmer on the internet, but I think the philosophical goals of hoodie are fundamentally different from meteor.