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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to HMPL

HMPL.js is a lightweight server-oriented template language for JavaScript. Fetch HTML, render it safely, and keep apps dynamic, modern, and small. Alternative to HTMX and Alpine.js.

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Hi HN! Together with contributors, we've been making a small template language for a year now, which, in our opinion, can replace HTMX and Alpine.js. It is a mix between EJS and Handlebars, that is, you can make a request with a familiar syntax to the server in HTML right in the markup. Requests are made via fetch and are configured via javascript almost entirely, which is what is needed today to work with the server. The very essence of the template language comes down to minimizing the size of the bundle of the original web application by moving the components to the server and then…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    HMPL▲2

    Template language for fetching HTML from API

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3HW
  4. 4
  5. 5

    Hey all, I just wanted to share a project I've been working on for the past month. After years of heavy frameworks, I really like the idea of using htmx, but it’s a little too low level for me and needs a thin layer above it to facilitate things like components, better syntax with complex JS inside of an attribute, etc To try and solve this problem with a very minimal stack (golang + htmx) that I've been really enjoying, I'm building this project to cater to my needs and was thinking it would be useful for other developers.

    2024 · htmgo.dev · its alternatives →

  6. 6
  7. 7

    I recently dug up an old project in an attempt to improve on it. It's a code sandbox for playing around with HTMX in the browser, that runs a mock server within the sandbox iframe. The server "framework" is loosely based on Django, so if you're familiar with Django, you'll immediately understand what's going on. I recommend clicking through the examples. Github repo: https://github.com/lassebomh/htmx-playground Probably my favorite part is the lack of HTMX specific code. It's designed to mimic the client and server, but really nothing else. In principle, this means that…

    2024 · lassebomh.github.io · its alternatives →

  8. 8HH

    Source https://github.com/dashborg/hibiki | Interactive Tutorial https://playground.hibikihtml.com/tutorial/ I love JavaScript, but for many projects -- especially internal tools and prototypes -- setting up a full frontend JavaScript stack (npm, webpack, babel, create-react-app, redux) and all of their configuration files, folders, and scaffolding is overkill. Hibiki HTML incrementally plugs into any backend, using any template language (even static HTML files) with a single script include. It includes a built-in frontend data model, Vue.js-like…

    2022 · playground.hibikihtml.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    I built µJS because I wanted AJAX navigation without the verbosity of HTMX or the overhead of Turbo. It intercepts links and form submissions, fetches pages via AJAX, and swaps fragments of the DOM. Single tag, one call to `mu.init()`. No build step, no dependencies. Key features: patch mode (update multiple fragments in one request), SSE support, DOM morphing via idiomorph, View Transitions, prefetch on hover, polling, and full HTTP verb support on any element. At ~5KB gzipped, it's smaller than HTMX (16KB) and Turbo (25KB), and works with any backend: PHP, Python, Go, Ruby, whatever.…

    Mar 2026 · mujs.org · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Hey HN, I'd like to share a fun project I've been working on: mizu.js. It's a js library that add functional attributes support into your html, designed to be a simple and flexible alternative to fully-fledged web frameworks (such as Vue, React, and Angular), while offering more capabilities than other lightweight options (like Alpine.js and htmx). As it's written using modern ES features and due to its isomorphic nature, it can be run in both browsers and runtimes (Node, Deno, Bun) without any changes. This makes it ideal for client-side and server-side rendering, as well as static site…

    2024 · mizu.sh · its alternatives →

  11. 11TN

    https://github.com/thi-ng/umbrella/blob/master/packages/hdom... Lightweight UI component tree definition syntax, DOM creation and differential updates using only vanilla JS data structures (arrays, iterators, closures, attribute objects or objects with life cycle functions, closures). By default targets the browser's native DOM, but supports other arbitrary target implementations in a branch-local manner, e.g. to define scene graphs for a canvas element as part of the normal UI tree. Benefits: - Use the full expressiveness of ES6 / TypeScript to…

    2018 · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Hi HN! I created this lib in the need of a simple and tiny framework to easily do AJAX-style navigation / replacement of fragments in the page, in a web application. For people who don't want to use client-side-rendering and complex frameworks à la React, there are nowadays a few "HTML-over-the-wire" libraries, like HTMX, Unpoly or this super-tiny one Swap.js :) One other key thing is that no external tool is needed: no bundler, no webpack, no TypeScript compiler, no minification needed. Just write HTML, JS (+ your preferred server-side language: PHP, Python, etc.) and it works. The…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    :umbrella: Lightweight javascript library for DOM manipulation and events

    2018 · umbrellajs.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    (spoiler: its XSLT) I've been working on a little demo for how to avoid copy-pasting header/footer boilerplate on a simple static webpage. My goal is to approximate the experience of Jekyll/Hugo but eliminate the need for a build step before publishing. This demo shows how to get basic templating features with XSL so you could write a blog post which looks like My Article some content hello hello Some properties which set this approach apart from other methods: - no build step (no need to setup Jekyll on the client or configure Github/Gitlab actions) - works on any webserver…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hey HN, We’re Philip, Amby, and Declan, and we made “multiplayer virtual computers” that you can embed anywhere, including 3D spaces. We decided to build this because we noticed that embedding third-party apps and websites can be a nightmare due to incompatible platforms, security issues, and poor UX. Adding multiplayer functionality to these embeds makes this problem exponentially more difficult. On the backend, we’re spinning up a VM and running a resource-optimized fork of Chromium which we then stream to participants via WebRTC. Since we’re hosting the servers running the applications,…

    2022 · threejs-example.hyperbeam.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    1kB-ish JavaScript framework for building hypertext applications - hyperapp/hyperapp

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    An Alpine.js plugin that includes the core functionality of HTMX in a streamlined (3KB) API.

    2024 · alpine-ajax.js.org · its alternatives →

  18. 18
  19. 19BS

    Basecoat ports the upcoming shadcn/ui v4 [1] to plain HTML + Tailwind (no React): - Live demo & documentation: https://basecoatui.com - MIT‑licensed and free: https://github.com/hunvreus/basecoat/ - Works with any backend (Flask, Django, Rails, PHP, etc.) or static site. - Fully theme‑compatible with shadcn/ui [2]. - Uses a sliver of Alpine.js only for a few interactive bits (e.g. combobox). Swap in your own JS if you prefer. - Dead simple to use, just drop in a class here and there: Click me Why I built it: after moving from a Next.js stack back…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Hey all! I've been using this stack personally for a while now and decided to automate it a bit by turning it into a template I can reuse. Hope others might find it helpful!

    2025 · bhvr.dev · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Full reactivity JS/TS framework. Lightweight replacement of React + MobX + React Router. Very small and fast !! - PxyUp/Revact

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22HH

    This is hyTags, a programming language embedded in HTML for building interactive web UIs. It started as a way to write full-stack web apps in Swift without a separate frontend, but grew into a small language with control flow, functions, and async handling via HTML tags. The result is backend language-agnostic and can be generated from any server that can produce HTML via templates or DSLs.

    Jan 2026 · hytags.org · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    An agnostic, reactive & minimalist (3kb) JavaScript UI library with direct access to native DOM.

    2021 · caldom.org · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    A lightweight boilerplate for a universal webapp based on koa, mongodb, node, vue, and webpack - yunhan0/koa-vue-fullstack

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

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