In the early 2010s, Meteor.js made waves in the JavaScript world. Its promise of full-stack reactivity, seamless client-server integration and a single language for the entire development pipeline was revolutionary. By 2015, Meteor had arguably reached the height of its popularity. The developer community was vibrant, tutorials and blog posts were abundant, and companies eagerly adopted it for building real-time web applications.
But fast-forward to 2025 and the story is dramatically different. While the framework technically still functions, Meteor has fallen behind on nearly every front that matters in modern web development. From outdated documentation to fundamental architectural issues, Meteor's age is showing-and for any team evaluating it today, the risks of adoption are serious and often understated.
One of the clearest signals of Meteor's decline is the dwindling presence of influential community members. Arunoda Susiripala, a core figure in the Meteor ecosystem and the creator of numerous critical packages and tools under the meteorhacks.com banner, exited the scene in 2015 and never came back. His departure marked the beginning of a slow but steady erosion of innovation and leadership within the community.
The ecosystem's health further reflects this decay. Consider the TypeScript definitions package @types/meteor, the only sort of presence of meteor besides the installer on NPM, which has seen a notable decline in downloads since 2022. This metric, while just one piece of the puzzle, speaks volumes about developer interest and the rate at which new projects are being created with Meteor. In a time when TypeScript has become a foundational part of any scalable JavaScript application, Meteor's lack of native support continues to be a critical shortcoming. Developers are still required to install TypeScript from Meteor atmosphere' packages, which creates friction and signals that Meteor has not caught up with modern standards.
The architecture of Meteor, once seen as innovative, now feels like a relic. Its approach to full-stack reactivity, for example, conflicts with the realities of modern frontend development. When integrating Meteor with component-based frameworks like React, the experience is often frustrating. React's unidirectional data flow clashes with Meteor's Tracker-based reactivity model, leading to unpredictable re-renders, subtle bugs, and performance headaches. What was once considered a magical feature of Meteor-automatic updates of the DOM when data changes-can become a liability when combined with modern view libraries that already manage their own reactivity patterns.
Another pain point that has haunted Meteor since its inception is its dual package management system. Meteor introduced its own package manager early on, before NPM became the standard it is today. While support for NPM was eventually added, it did not replace Meteor's system. Instead, developers are forced to juggle both, leading to version conflicts, unclear dependency trees, and toolchain ambiguity. This issue was raised as early as 2015 on the Meteor forums, and remarkably, ten years later, the problem remains unresolved. Few modern frameworks subject developers to this kind of friction, and yet Meteor still does. How will Meteor adapt to Deno and Bun on the server side?
On top of this dual package management, developers have to manage Cordova and its plugin versions. Cordova requires to install plugins for basic things like camera access and so on. Which version of Cordova Meteor runs? Which package you have to update to? It's all for the developer to find out in the Meteor forum and the Cordova website while there are frameworks like Expo and Capacitor/Ionic that remove this burden.
Testing, a cornerstone of reliable software development, is another area where Meteor struggles. Unlike modern frameworks that either integrate or strongly encourage comprehensive testing workflows, Meteor makes it feel like an afterthought. There is old documentation on testing but how to test a Meteor v3 application is an uncharted territory. For teams building critical applications, the cost of retrofitting a testable architecture onto a system that doesn't promote it from the start is simply too high. This lack of documentation on tests makes this framework feel like a weekend project.
One of the most problematic architectural quirks of Meteor is its handling of client-server execution. In Meteor, shared methods may run both on the server and in a client-side simulation to reduce perceived latency. To manage this, developers use the isSimulation flag, a boolean that tells them whether the current code execution is happening on the client or server. In practice, this leads to functions that behave in two completely different ways depending on where they're executed. The simulated client version is often a stub, while the server version performs the actual logic. While clever in theory, this dual-execution model makes code harder to understand, debug, and test. It forces developers to reason about two behavioral contexts simultaneously, often without clear separation, which introduces subtle bugs and increases cognitive overhead. Previously they faced async problems behavior and to solve this they introduced this.unblock() so that, in a reverse thinking of await, it makes an long sync function async by not waiting for it to end though now we can convert such function to async instead.
Here's a detailed explanation of this design problem:
All these problems don't just add up-they multiply. The lack of solid documentation means newer developers struggle to ramp up. The architectural oddities, like dual execution and outdated package systems, mean even experienced developers find themselves writing custom workarounds. Combine that with weak TypeScript support and poor testing tools, and you end up with a framework that actively resists many of the best practices adopted across the industry over the past decade. How will Meteor integrate ts-go when it will be released? This wrapping of packages for Meteor is getting costly.
Meanwhile, alternative frameworks have flourished. Ionic, Capacitor and Expo have embraced the latest trends in performance, DX, and maintainability. These ecosystems offer first-class TypeScript support, built-in testing frameworks, modern deployment tooling, and a culture of continuous improvement.
To be clear, Meteor still has some use cases. It can be useful for internal tools or prototypes where rapid development outweighs long-term maintainability. Legacy applications built with Meteor may continue to serve their purpose, provided they are isolated and stable. But starting a new business-critical project with Meteor in 2025 is an increasingly indefensible choice. The risks of relying on an outdated, unsupported, and conceptually confused framework are just too high.
In the end, the web moves fast. Meteor decision to take a different path in the past became it's weakness as it moves slower than other frameworks. What was once a groundbreaking tool is now a cautionary tale in the importance of evolving with the ecosystem. For teams and developers who value long-term maintainability, developer happiness, and modern standards, it's time to let Meteor go.
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