Node.js is an extremely powerful, popular open-source, server-side platform. It grows in popularity every day, being used by large companies such as eBay, Yahoo, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Node.js application development uses an event-driven, non-blocking input/output model, which makes it fast and very efficient. Also, npm, the Node.js package ecosystem, is the largest collection of open source libraries in the world. When you compare Node.js with PHP, you will see that they do similar jobs, but in completely different ways, as both are server-side scripting languages. Node.js can be used to create a website, but not by itself, in the same way, that PHP requires the use of HTML, CSS, etc. within the PHP code to create a website.