If you find a list of top technologies for backend development, it is almost certain that NodeJS would be somewhere at the top and more interestingly, it is equally certain that Golang or Go, as it is normally referred, wouldn't feature on the list at all. That doesn't mean Go is in any way inferior to NodeJS- quite the contrary in many ways as we will discuss in a moment. Go is just an underrated language which if used properly can easily outmatch NodeJS across all benchmarks.

So the question is, why isn't Go used more often and is it really as good as NodeJS, if not more? Let's find out:

Maturity

The age of a language determines a lot about its face value. New languages are often riddled with bugs while older languages struggle with performance and architecture. The age of around 10-15 years is considered the sweet spot when technologies to be most productive with minimum bugs and maximum community support. Both NodeJS and Go fall into that sweet spot.
Performance

Performance of languages is very tough to compare due to two key reasons:

Languages perform differently in different environments as each has their own set of preferences.

Even if we obtain a benchmark in a controlled environment, that doesn’t offer any valuable insights for real-world usage.

For instance, Go performs better than NodeJS in almost every benchmark test but when it comes to real-world performance, they stand almost head-to-head.

Concurrency

This one of the areas where Go clearly outperforms NodeJS and also one of the reasons why it remains underrated. Go is frequently used in mathematical applications that need to exploit the full computing capacity through parallel threads. In general usage, however, a single thread does a pretty good job. And if you factor in the complexity of multi-threaded applications against single thread programs of Go, you would get a clear idea why developers tend to avoid Go.

Scalability

Technically speaking, Go is far more scalable than Node but scaling NodeJS applications is far easier than Go. That is, you are looking to build a really large scale application and have the required expertise, Go would be far well suited for the job. For general applications, however, the NodeJS offers sufficient scalability.

Use cases

NodeJS can be used only at the backend. And given that its just a run-time environment and the JS is already used on the client-side, it’s the best you can expect. Go can be used for frontend development as well. It uses Goper.js to run the Go code on the browser itself. As JavaScript is far more suitable for frontend development, we believe NodeJS has an upper hand in this regard.

Ease of learning

This perhaps the biggest advantage of Node.JS vs. Go. Since Node uses one of the most popular languages- JavaScript, something that most web developers already know, getting started with NodeJS is fairly simple. Any developer with a good grasp on JS can become a Node developer within a matter of weeks. For Go, however, they would need to learn an entirely new language with its own style.

Community support

Technologies with a larger developer community tend to grow even faster due to readily available support and a host of other supplementary tools and components. To extend the previous point, when fewer developers learn Go, its community remains smaller and thus it grows even slower. The reverse is true for NodeJS.

Final verdict

As you may have noticed in the discussion of Nodejs vs Golang, the latter is far more capable in almost all technical benchmarks. Where Go actually falls behind Node is the ease of development and consequent developer support. The point is, if you have a capable web application development company on your side, Go would definitely deliver better results but otherwise, you should stick with NodeJS.