It&#x27;s easy to forget that html isn&#x27;t the end product, the end result is lit pixels on some screen (usually). If we send json then that needs to be converted to html and that html needs to be layout and rendered. If we send html we just skip the first step. Displaying a web page isn&#x27;t &quot;free&quot; for the client just because it&#x27;s html.<p>The question is this: what kind of overhead is a template rendering task (in js) for a modern browser, compared to the task of layout and rendering a finished html page? It will depend of course on the complexity of the data and the resulting page, as well as the browser, templating engine etc. I have no clue whether it&#x27;s 1%, 10% or 50%.