Right now Hogan seems to be slower and appears to have less features than Handlebars: http://jsperf.com/t-bench2/6

Couple hours later, Hogan is faster than Handlebars: http://jsperf.com/t-bench2/7

I may be misunderstanding this, but that benchmark appears to be based on an in-browser compilation, while Hogan's advantage is the ability to precompile templates.

The compile happens in the setup of the benchmark. So the actual benchmark is testing the rendering speed of the compiled templates.

Handlebars is also capable of precompiling AFAIK.

handlebars is based on mustache

So is Hogan, apparently.

Not based, it just does the same thing.

Actually, “hogan.js is a compiler for the Mustache templating language” –from https://github.com/twitter/hogan.js

It is compiler for Mustache, it does the same thing, it passes the same tests, but they didn't take Mustache code and improve it -- which is in my opinion what being based on means, they instead started from scratch and wrote a brand new parser.