Meteor is good, but not at everything, so it's very important to understand the trade-offs.<p><i>Pros:</i><p>0. Obviously, its major strength is its "real-time"[0] nature: I have built multiple chat systems (and presumably so has anyone else who's used Meteor, because it's an example of something that's fun and easy with Meteor but relatively hard with a traditional stack) as well as a map application that tracked the motion of a company's employees in relation to their destination (as part of a dispatching system).<p>1. It's also the least complicated way of sharing code between the browser and the server that I've seen to date.<p><i>Cons:</i><p>0. It's non-npm package manager feels like NIH to me (although I'm sure the team had valid reasons, I've never looked into it). Apparently it's still possible to require npm modules[1], although I've never tried it.<p>1. You're more or less stuck with MongoDB for the time being, which I guess a lot of people like but it's not really my thing.<p>2. There's not really any SEO capability, but that's sort of a given. Just don't use Javascript frameworks for that sort of project (or do, and do all sorts of weird shit to help Google).<p>3. It's kind of too auto-magic for me sometimes. The documentation is generally very good, but I occasionally run into weird variable scoping issues and the like, without any way of really figuring out what's happening. Of course, the source code is available[2] if I had time to read it. (Well-written, but big, and I find reading Node code to be mentally more taxing because of all the callbacks.)<p>4. The biggest con, for me, is that Meteor is basically limited to web applications. I really enjoy the typical single-page web app approach of building an API first, which you can access from other apps later (ie. mobile/tablet). I have no idea how I'd do that with Meteor. I'm experimenting with bundling a Meteor project and inserting the client-side code into a Phonegap app, for a mobile chat thing I'm working on, but that's obviously not ideal.<p>Generally, I love working with Meteor. I know I've written more cons than pros, but the pros I've listed are <i>huge</i>, and they've allowed me to work on cool stuff. You just need to know what you're getting into.<p><i>Footnotes/Links:</i><p>0. The scare quotes are for the people familiar with embedded real-time systems who seem to always find these comments and complain about how that word has an entirely different meaning when it comes to web applications.<p>1. <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10165978/how-do-we-or-can-we-use-node-modules-via-npm-with-meteor" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10165978/how-do-we-or-can...</a><p>2. <a href="https://github.com/meteor/meteor" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/meteor/meteor</a>