Oskar Krawczyk – blog.olicio.us

This article is outdated. Please visit http://www.jqueryvsmootools.com/ for a great write-up by Aaron Newton.

There is no simple answer to this, or a comprehensive answer that could be contained within the 140 characters that Twitter blesses us with… Well actually I used to reply If you need to ask than your better off with jQuery – but that didn’t worked out.

Both of these wonderful frameworks are significantly different in the approach of how things are being done. Resig’s jQuery by design was directed for people who want to achieve a certain effect with the most minimum code possible. I also have to mention that since jQuery is a widely recognizable project it has a huge community of users behind it, hence an impressive number of available plugins.

Similarly, MooTools can do pretty much the same thing if you really need to, and on top of that it can do a lot more – where it this case Mr. Modularity, Extensibility, Prototypeability (if there’s such a word) are entering the stage. I strongly suggest Aaron Newton’s MooTools Talk from the Ajax Experience (2008), who elaborates on this topic quite significantly.

My framework of choice was MooTools (in the days when it was still called Moo.fx), I have used it in most of the recent projects I’ve been working on and never looked back. It gives me everything I need, beginning with simple element.fade('out') to handling all of the libraries and Engine files I write.

Almost forgot, speed-wise… I could say that MooTools is faster (which it is) but in reality speed differences between these two frameworks are so insignificant that you shouldn’t really be considering them as a point-of-decision. Besides, everything is slow as s*it in IE.

Update

There’s also the second most repeted question How to make MooTools and jQuery work on one page, there’s a simple answer to that– use the noConflict option:

jQuery.noConflict();
 
// Use jQuery via jQuery(...)
jQuery(document).ready(function(){
  jQuery("div").hide();
});

More on the subject: Using jQuery with other libraries