Meteor developer for a long time here. Meteor, today, is still a good match for small to medium applications that provide real-time features in more than 50% c

Meteor developer for a long time here. Meteor, today, is still a good match for small to medium applications that provide real-time features in more than 50% components/pages. For most applications Meteor becomes a real pain in the ass. I wrote several applications for multiple clients, in 4 years I haven't wrote a single one that used the real-time features properly. A tradicional stack is simply much more flexible when compared to Meteor. The problem today is that Meteor is not a component that you can't easily plug and play like Angular, React, Express, etc. Example: You would like provided a real-time widget on another website? Open an iframe and load the entire application and waste more than 300 megabytes on the browser. Or use a non-official package and hack the shit out of it. MDG (Company who developed and maintains Meteor) went too greedy. In order to use Meteor you have to be fully committed to the stack. Although the project is open source, you will waste several hours trying to modify Meteor to be make it more modular. Event today if you want to use the DDP protocol outside of Meteor, you've to use 3rd party non official packages. Meteor was great in the beginning but failed to play nicely with the rest of the JS ecosystem even although some work was done in that direction. Arunoda played a HUGE role by building and writing a lot. As a prototype tool Meteor is excellent, it's very hard to find a framework/tool that provides what Meteor provides. Building a real-time application with modular components isn't trivial, Meteor just offers a lot for free: LiveQuery, Authentication, Server-Client shared code, Consistent API, client side implementation of MongoDB (minimongo), painless build system, easy deployment, etc. You can build a prototype in record time. Play with Meteor, you won't regret it. Scaling applications is always hard, requires in depth knowledge and time. Meteor is websocket based, there is not need to compare with an HTTP based API since it is unfair. Scaling a real-time application is hard on any language/framework. For most projects FireBase will do the trick if you've a small number of real-time components. My advice: Pick the right tool for the right job. Most of the complains typically come from project that are not a decent match for real-time applications. I worked on many project because someone decided to use Meteor regardless of their technical knowledge to decide so.