&gt; JVM provides a great deal more APIs for creating and handling threads and processes. Not something you would typically do directly in many webapp backends but there if you need it.<p>You might not need it <i>directly</i>, but under the hood it allows each request to run in its own thread, which eliminates the need for asynchronous callbacks that pollute any node.js code.  The absence of async callbacks not only makes the code cleaner, but also means that when you&#x27;re debugging and hit a breakpoint, you can follow the call stack all the way back to the request entrypoint.<p>&quot;Asynchronous Libraries&quot; is listed as a pro for Node, but unless you&#x27;re doing something very IO-intensive at 10K req&#x2F;sec, asynchronicity is not going to matter one bit on the JVM since it&#x27;s multithreaded.  Going from sync to async at 10K req&#x2F;s will save you a few MB of RAM, that&#x27;s all.  Assuming you&#x27;ve got that few MB to spare, it won&#x27;t change your throughput or responsiveness at all.  It&#x27;s a premature optimization that makes coding and debugging more difficult.  I&#x27;d rather state this as &quot;Needs Async Libraries&quot; as a con for Node.