Node.js Template Engines in 2026: EJS vs Pug vs Nunjucks — Which One for Server-Side Rendering?

Your Express server needs to render HTML. You can concatenate strings — for about a week, until you need layouts, includes, conditionals, and HTML escaping that actually works. That is what template engines are for, and Node.js has three serious candidates: EJS (8,117 stars), Pug (21,853 stars), and Nunjucks (8,984 stars). They look interchangeable at a glance — they all take data and produce HTML — but they differ so much in syntax, safety defaults, and ecosystem fit that picking the wrong one will cost you either a debugging week or a security review.

TL;DR / Quick Verdict

Choose EJS if you want plain JavaScript inside your templates and a one-line Express integration (app.set('view engine', 'ejs')) — it is the least magical option and the safest for teams that hate learning new syntax. Choose Pug if you care about terse, indentation-based markup and are building design-heavy, template-maintained sites — its syntax is beautiful and its star count reflects that love, but the whitespace rules have a learning curve. Choose Nunjucks if you need jinja2-style inheritance, filters, and macros with autoescaping on by default, or if your templates must run in the browser. If you are handling untrusted user input as template source, all three are unsafe — that is the one rule that overrides every other consideration.

Feature Comparison (live GitHub data, August 2026)

Use-Case Decision Matrix

EJS — JavaScript, But Inside Your HTML

EJS (“Embedded JavaScript Templates”) is the closest thing to “no framework at all”: your template file is HTML, with <% %> tags where logic goes. The README’s canonical example is exactly two lines of control flow:

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<% if (user) { %>
  <h2><%= user.name %></h2>
<% } %>

The three tag types are the whole syntax model: <% %> executes code (control flow), <%= %> outputs escaped HTML, and <%- %> outputs raw HTML. The README also documents the full API surface:

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const template = ejs.compile(str, options);
template(data);
// => Rendered HTML string

ejs.render(str, data, options);
// => Rendered HTML string

ejs.renderFile(filename, data, options, function(err, str){
    // str => Rendered HTML string
});

EJS v6.0 (current) imports cleanly under Rollup, esbuild, Webpack, Vite, Browserify, Bun, and Deno, and supports both CommonJS and ES Modules — a genuine improvement after years of dual-package pain. It is also the only one of the three that is a first-class Express view engine with zero configuration. Features from the README: custom delimiters (e.g. [? ?] instead of <% %>), includes, newline-slurping -%> tags, whitespace-trimming <%_ _%>, client-side support, and static template caching.

The trade-off: because templates are plain JavaScript, there is no escaping default — you must remember <%= %> for anything user-controlled, and any logic you can write, you can also write badly. And EJS is effectively a JavaScript runtime: the README’s security section is blunt — never give end-users unfettered access to the render method, or you are responsible for the consequences (remote code execution, data exposure).

Pug — Terse Markup With a Cult Following

Pug (formerly Jade — renamed when “Jade” turned out to be a registered trademark) is a high-performance engine heavily influenced by Haml. Instead of tags, you write indentation, and the README’s syntax example shows the whole philosophy in a dozen lines:

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doctype html
html(lang="en")
  head
    title= pageTitle
    script(type='text/javascript').
      if (foo) bar(1 + 5);
  body
    h1 Pug - node template engine
    #container.col
      if youAreUsingPug
        p You are amazing
      else
        p Get on it!
      p.
        Pug is a terse and simple templating language with a
        strong focus on performance and powerful features.

No closing tags, no angle brackets — #container.col means <div id="container" class="col">, title= pageTitle means <title> with the variable interpolated. Pug compiles to highly optimized JavaScript and escapes output by default, and its mixins let you define reusable UI blocks. It also has a real CLI (pug --help after npm install pug-cli -g) for one-off rendering and file watching, plus professional support through Tidelift.

The trade-off: the syntax is the whole product, and it is unforgiving — an extra space or a wrong indentation level is a parse error, and debugging generated HTML that came from a template you can’t “see” in the output is a real skill. Pug’s last push was March 2026, and its package is split across many sub-packages (lexer, parser, linker, code-gen), which is great for maintenance but confusing when you start reading its source. If your team includes designers who edit templates directly, be sure they buy into indentation-based markup.

Nunjucks — jinja2’s JavaScript Cousin, by Mozilla

Nunjucks is Mozilla’s full-featured engine, heavily inspired by jinja2 (Python). If you know {{ variable }} and {% for %} you already know 80% of it. The official getting-started shows the two-level API — configure once, then render:

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nunjucks.configure({ autoescape: true });
nunjucks.renderString('Hello {{ username }}', { username: 'James' });

// usually you'll render files from a views directory instead:
nunjucks.configure('views', { autoescape: true });
nunjucks.render('index.html', { foo: 'bar' });

The docs are explicit that you should prefer render over renderString so you get template inheritance and includes. Nunjucks’s differentiators: autoescaping is on by default, filters and macros (jinja2-style), async control flow for loading data during render, and first-class browser support — there is a full build (~20 kB min/gzipped) and a slim build (~8 kB) that only works with precompiled templates, plus grunt/gulp tasks for production precompilation. The built-in file watcher (which requires installing chokidar separately) is a nice development convenience.

The trade-off: Nunjucks is the heaviest of the three to integrate with Express (it needs an adapter rather than being a native view engine), and its docs carry the same sandbox warning as EJS — “nunjucks does not sandbox execution so it is not safe to run user-defined templates” — with remote code execution and cross-site scripting listed as the consequences. Treat it as a trusted-template engine, not a user-input template engine.

Common Pitfalls and Migration Gotchas

1. None of these engines sandbox template execution. This is the #1 security rule across all three: never render user-supplied template source. EJS and Nunjucks both document remote code execution as the direct consequence; Pug is equally unsafe for untrusted source even though its docs are quieter about it.
2. Escaping is not free. EJS defaults to raw HTML (<%= %> escapes, but only if you use it); Pug and Nunjucks escape by default. Audit every render call site for user-controlled data — a single res.render('index', req.query) in EJS (the README literally uses this as the anti-example) is a stored XSS factory.
3. Pug whitespace errors are cryptic. Unexpected token "indent" usually means a mixed tab/space line or a stray indentation. Configure your editor to show whitespace and standardize on spaces; the parser is deterministic, but your editor should be too.
4. EJS newline-slurping surprises. <% -%> trims the trailing newline, <%_ _%> trims surrounding whitespace. Copy-pasting templates between engines or older tutorials often introduces stray blank lines in rendered output — check the rendered HTML, not just the template.
5. Nunjucks browser builds need precompilation for production. The slim build only renders precompiled templates; ship the full build in development, then switch to grunt/gulp-precompiled slim builds for production to keep the payload at ~8 kB.
6. Migrating between engines means rewriting, not translating. Pug’s mixins and Nunjucks’s macros are not compatible; EJS includes are not inheritance. If you move a template suite (e.g. to Nunjucks for inheritance), plan a full layout restructure, not a find-and-replace. For email rendering pipelines, our MJML and handlebars email template guide and the PHP template engines comparison cover adjacent ecosystems worth comparing before you commit.

FAQ

What is the easiest Node.js template engine to learn? EJS. Templates are regular HTML with <% %> JavaScript tags, so there is no new syntax to learn and it works as a native Express view engine with app.set('view engine', 'ejs'). Pug requires learning indentation-based markup; Nunjucks requires learning jinja2-style tags.

Is Pug still maintained in 2026? Yes. The last push to the Pug repository was March 2026, and the project has professional support through Tidelift. Its development pace is slower than EJS’s, but it is not abandoned.

Which engine escapes HTML by default? Pug and Nunjucks (when autoescape: true is configured, which the official docs recommend). EJS does not — you must use the <%= %> tag for escaped output and <%- %> for raw output.

Can I use these template engines in the browser? EJS supports client-side rendering; Pug compiles templates to JavaScript functions you can ship; Nunjucks has official browser builds including a slim ~8 kB variant for precompiled templates.

Are any of these engines safe for user-submitted templates? No. EJS’s README and Nunjucks’s docs both explicitly state their engines are not sandboxed and that running user-defined templates can lead to remote code execution or cross-site scripting. Pug is equally unsafe. Always treat template source as trusted code.

Which engine is best for email templates? EJS is a common choice because it renders plain HTML strings with minimal ceremony, and Pug/Nunjucks are also used. For visual, responsive emails you will still want an HTML-inlining pipeline — see our email template rendering guide for the MJML-based workflow.

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