I'm definitely new at both, but I'll give you the newbie perspective. Ember is a front-end framework which allows you to use whatever back-end you feel like to

I'm definitely new at both, but I'll give you the newbie perspective. Ember is a front-end framework which allows you to use whatever back-end you feel like to feed it. E.g., you could use Ember with Node, Rails, Django, etc. Meteor is the whole package: front and back-end with a lot of glue built in that makes coordinating front and back-end easier. At least that's the impression I get. I'm also very impressed by Ember--though it, like Meteor, is challenging to learn due to the dearth of learning materials. This book is the second (as far as I know) Meteor book, and there's only one book I'm aware of available for Ember (Master Space and Time with Javascript: Ember).