LAMP vs MEAN: What is the right stack for you?

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The Era of APIs

5 min readJul 26, 2019

With many organizations around the world intensely depending on programming for their everyday undertaking, the need for big business level applications, sites, and servers has become apparent. When developing an app from scratch, utilizing consistent, scalable, and standardized software is imperative. While web stacks have become a crucial part of development, they have evolved over the years, making it harder for developers to choose. LAMP and MEAN are two of the most popular development stacks. And even although they rely on different technologies for backend languages, server environment, and databases, there has been a lot of contention about which of the two is better.

In this article, we will take an in-depth look at each of the web stack highlighting its pros and cons to show you their main differences.

What is LAMP?

LAMP is a set of software subsystems that are combined to perform tasks without dependencies on external software or data. It is the short form for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. LAMP works as a bunch of software programs that allow seamless and smooth integration with each other, thus becoming one of the most potent platforms for web application development.

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With the largest and oldest community, and robust libraries and tools, LAMP delivers an excellent platform for hosting and developing prominent, high-performing web applications. Its components include:

Linux (Operating System)
Apache (Web Server)
MySQL (Code Managing the Database)
PHP (Programming Language)

Historically, LAMP has been the most reliable and highly effective platform to develop web apps at the enterprise level. It boasts a great history and provides app developers with room for customization. Its users include Oracle, Linux, and Zend, among others.

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What are the Pros and Cons of LAMP Stack

One of the greatest benefits of using LAMP is its widespread support. The PHP and MySQL backend techs are renowned by many and supported several hosting providers. Therefore, you can host everywhere and access the most robust CMS engines.
Since LAMP stack is open-source, interactions between end-users and the source can be changed to suit the developer’s needs.
PHP and MySQL programs are easy to comprehend, and thus, they make LAMP convenient for beginners. This is because its deployment is seamless as it uses PHP as an APACHE module and facilitates uploads PHP files through MySQL Database.
The non-blocking structure of LAMP makes it more scalable and faster to develop.
For distinctive necessities, developers can customize modules using the LAMP stack.
This web stack only supports variants Linux operating system.
LAMP makes it daunting to switch between PHP or Python and then use HTML or JavaScript.

What is MEAN?

MEAN can be defined as a software bundle that stands for MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJand NodeJS. Working together, these software programs helps to simplify the web development process. The core strength of MEAN stack is in its centralization of JavaScript as its primary programming language. Every component in this web stack is written in JavaScript and the database stores data in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format. This means that JS is not only used as a client-side scripting language but also in the entire application, which increases productivity. Its integral components include:

MongoDB (data persistence)
Express.js (server-side application framework)
Angular (client-side application)
Node.JS (server-side environment)

MEAN stack helps to develop apps that are scalable, flexible, and extensible, which makes it the ideal candidate for cloud hosting. The use of JavaScript also gifts developers the chance to reuse code across the application, reducing the need for reinventing the wheel in every development stage.

What are the Pros and Cons of MEAN Stack?

The main reason why most developers enjoy using mean is the use of a single language (JavaScript), which allows switching between the client and the server easier.
With MEAN, you can create simple open-source solutions which can be used to develop robust and maintainable applications.
It allows real-time demonstration of apps. In this modern era, having a real-time demo app for subscribers /viewers is crucial. MEAN can help you make real-time changes to your app even during the development stage.
It is cloud compatible. With cloud functionalities becoming an integral part of modern websites and apps, the MongoDB in MEAN allows you to develop, test, and deploy those functionalities with much ease.
It’s cost-effective and time-conscious. With MEAN, you don’t have to hire several experts for every single task. If you get a JavaScript developer, you can build an app from start to finish, thus saving a lot of time and money.
MongoDB can be ideal for small and mid-size applications, but for large-scale applications, it could potentially lead to loss of data when networking partitioning occurs. This doesn’t happen all the time, but it is bound to manifest as time goes by.
Express.js provides poor isolation of server from business logic. This can curtail the reuse of certain services such as batching operations.
It becomes challenging to go back to the old approach once you develop the first site using MEAN stack technology.

Differences between MEAN vs LAMP

Operating System

LAMP stack allows developers to deploy web applications on a variant of Linux operating system only. MEAN, on the other hand, doesn’t list any operating system in their components. Therefore, with MEAN stack, users can deploy their apps on any OS that supports Node.JS.

Programming Language

LAMP allows developers to code in PHP. And even though MySQL offers better support to PHP in comparison to other programs, programmers can replace PHP with Python or Perl as the components in this stack can be interchanged. On the other hand, developers using MEAN stack are required to write codes in JavScript both in the client-side and server-side since components are not interchangeable.

While LAMP has Apache Web Server as its component, MEAN stack utilizes a webserver powered by Node.JS. The Apache Web Server is more mature and robust than Node.JS. However, Node.JS is not only modern and lightweight but also provides a non-blocking and event-based web server.

Although MySQL is the default Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) for LAMP, developers have an option of replacing it with other RDBMS such as PostgreSQL and MariaDB. Additionally, they can also use NoSQL databases such as MongoDB. On the hand, MEAN stack users are required to work exclusively with MongoDB.

Front-End Component

Unlike MEAN stack which allows developers to use Angular.JS to facilitate front-end development, LAMP stack doesn’t have any component for such function. This means that programmers need to employ additional JavaScript frameworks and tools to create front-end web applications when using LAMP stack.

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