What Is Meteor?

Meteor is a JavaScript framework for quickly prototyping and building scalable web, mobile and desktop applications with reactive features.

Meteor is used by many medium-sized and enterprise companies and is publicly available under the MIT license. The framework is also actively maintained and has ongoing patch releases.

In June 2025, Meteor released version 3.3.0, which featured improvements like supported SWC for transpilation, supported CPU profiling, a modern build stack, switching to the @parcel/watcher module, updated Node.js support and more.

How Does Meteor Work?

Meteor is a full-stack framework. In practice, that means Meteor applications include client code, which runs in either a web browser or mobile app, server code inside a Node.js container, as well as a common code that runs on both client and server sides.

The file structure used by Meteor is simple: All client-side files are located in the client directory and all server-side files (Node.js) are located in the server directory. Entry points to both client and server apps are also created automatically by the CLI.

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Key Features of Meteor

Meteor Integrations

Meteor integrates with all of the popular front-end frameworks out-of-the-box including Angular, React, Vue, Svelte and Blaze. 

As for databases, Meteor supports any database with a Node.js driver. However, MongoDB is definitely the most popular choice among Meteor developers. 

Meteor can also be used to seamlessly create both iOS and Android apps since React Native or Apache Cordova is used to compile the code. Due to its increasing popularity, developers added React Native integration to Meteor.  

Meteor Resources

The Meteor team has built extensive, highly detailed documentation for developers, comprised of the following resources:

• The tutorials page: This is the ideal place for beginners to start. 
• The Meteor examples GitHub repository: This repo features many open-source sample applications built with Meteor.
• The Meteor guide: Once you’re acquainted with the basics, the guide covers intermediate to advanced content. 

There are also several community resources available to Meteor developers. These include:

• Discussion forums where members of the community can interact with each other and with members of the Meteor core team
• The Slack community 
• Atmosphere, the repository of Meteor community packages  

Meteor Cloud

Meteor also offers cloud services to host, monitor and manage Meteor apps. Meteor Cloud boasts the following features:

• Meteor-specific hosting
• Collaboration via organizations
• Free deploy
• Access to Atmosphere and Meteor APM from one centralized dashboard. 

Note: As of May 2025, Galaxy (formerly combined with Meteor) became a separate hosting solution, and Meteor Cloud shifted to emphasize framework tooling.

Advantages of Meteor

JavaScript Only

Meteor allows you to develop full-stack applications in one programming language: JavaScript. This means that you will be using the same language both in the client and server, which isn’t necessarily the norm. 

Community Support

Meteor is backed by the community. It was developed as an open-source project and even though they’ve gone commercial with Meteor Cloud, Meteor still boasts a supportive open-source community.  

Cross-Platform Code

Meteor allows you to write cross-platform code. Meteor can generate mobile apps from the source code of your web application. You can also work from a single codebase with full Android, iOS and web support.  

Build Real-Time Applications

With Meteor, you can build real-time applications by default. Meteor offers a publication and subscription API which allows developers to publish data from the server’s database, and subscribe to it within the client so changes to the data are reflected in the client in real time.  

Security

Meteor has several built-in security measures including encryption, HTML escaping, secure browser storage and more.

Disadvantages of Meteor

Risk of Inefficiency

Because Meteor has Node.js at its core and JavaScript can be less performant than other programming languages, applications that require heavy computational work will most likely be inefficient. 

Performance Bottleneck

Real-time publications are an amazing feature that Meteor offers, built on top of MongoDB, but it’s also Meteor’s main performance bottleneck. Tracking real-time data results in a high performance cost, so it’s important to make sure that publications are used only when reactivity is strictly required. 

Tightly Coupled to MongoDB  

Meteor is tightly coupled to MongoDB. If you’d rather use a relational database instead of MongoDB, this will require making changes to your application and potentially losing some of Meteor’s out-of-the-box features, including authentication and real-time publications and subscriptions, unless you implement them yourself. 

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Meteor Examples

There are hundreds of applications built with Meteor. Here are some key examples:

• Chatra, a real-time chat application for customer support. 
• Apify, a web scraping and automation platform. 
• Any.run, an interactive malware hunting service.

How to Set Up Meteor

The first step to creating a Meteor application is installing Meteor. Currently OS X, Windows and Linux operating systems all support Meteor. 

Once installed, you can use the Meteor command-line interface (CLI) to create a new project and specify the front-end framework you want to use. All of the necessary files will be created automatically by the CLI. 

From here, you can start coding your app.

Frequently Asked Questions