Your question strikes me as an odd one. Meteor just came out. I'm not sure that there are any folks who have built any substantial systems using Meteor yet (aside from it's authors) who would be able to give you a firm recommendation.

That said, Meteor and Backbone do different things. Meteor is an attempt to solve (obviate, really) the mismatch between client/server development. To what extent it does this in a reasonable fashion is yet to be fully explored (although it does look awesome!)

Backbone is a client-side JS application toolkit. It's purpose is to bundle up the things that are common to every JS application, and provide a solid API to hook your application code to, and to hook your app to your RESTful server API. That said, Backbone offers more than just a convention for how your JS app talks to your API.

You will note that Backbone is included in the default set of installable Meteor packages.

I'm in the process of learning Backbone and just read about Meteor, so I might be completely wrong on this. But it seems like Backbone and Meteor are trying to solve different problems, and aren't mutually exclusive. Backbone is server-agnostic, and Meteor is somewhat client-agnostic, so you could use Meteor to do the data synchronization and automatic updating, while structuring your client app using Backbone.

Backbone is almost at the top of the javascript toolkit levels. Let's put it in perspective: - backbone - jquery - meteor <- the low level of the high level :) You use meteor as a foundation to build your application as backbone is more or less your application itself. Think "CoreFoundation" vs "AppKit" kind of difference.

by jguimont

I was very impressed with Meteor, but it is very new and isn't really bringing anything of substance to the table yet. Everything (other than client-side database interaction, which I am confused about who would want), that they spotlighted can be duplicated easily with backbone, node, and socket.io...right now. Moreover, backbone, in particular, is clearly a tool, like a screwdriver, that does a few things well and gets out of your way, whereas Meteor, like rails used to be, is more like an electronic lockpick...awesome magic for the limited scope of applicability, but not currently useful for most of the things you want to do in real life.

Learning Backbone is a great way to get practice with MVC and the "Observer" pattern if you haven't done it before.

Also it's a much better way of organizing your DOM structure than a bunch of loose jQuery calls.