monk vs mongoose for Mongodb

Question

I'm learning NodeJs.

To connect to and use MongoDB from NodeJS, I see a lot of examples using either Monk or Mongoose.

Are these two libraries equivalent ? Do they have the same features or do they each have a specific purpose ?

As a beginner with NodeJS, which should I use ?

Here are some examples of code that uses Monk :

var mongo = require('mongodb');
var monk = require('monk');
var db = monk('localhost:27017/nodejsapp');

----
exports.userlist = function(db) {
    return function(req, res) {
        var collection = db.get('users');
        collection.find({},{},function(e,docs){
            res.render('userlist', {
                "userlist" : docs
            });
        });
    };
};

and here a sample that uses Mongoose :

   var mongoose = require('mongoose');
----
 mongoose.connect('localhost', 'test');
 var db = mongoose.connection;
  db.on('error', console.error.bind(console, 'connection error:'));
  db.once('open', function callback() {
   console.log('Connected to DB');
});

// User Schema
var userSchema = mongoose.Schema({
   username: { type: String, required: true, unique: true },
   email: { type: String, required: true, unique: true },
  password: { type: String, required: true},
});

Answer 1

are they same thing do the same connection ? or do they have specific purpose ?

They are different, although they are two approaches to the same basic problem. Mongoose is a quite sophisticated full-on ORM. More features, but more complexity. Monk is smaller in scope and thus easier to understand.

My suggestion is start coding with the basic mongodb driver module directly. When you understand how that works, and how parts of it are annoying, you will understand the benefit of monk and can try that out to see if you like it. I wouldn't recommend mongoose to a beginner. Mongodb is already tricky enough to learn and while mongoose can be helpful, it's API is quite magical and assumes you already know the tricky aspects of mongodb.

Answer 2

If you are learning NodeJS and Mongo, you really dont need anything else -- in fact, MongoDB offers a free online class for MongoDB and NodeJS developers. No need for any additional wrappers.

See https://university.mongodb.com/