Which is faster: JavaScript or jQuery?

Javascript and jQuery are not two completely different things: jQuery is a Javascript library . Jquery is written by experienced javascript developers and allows you to manipulated the Dom easily. You can do very complex things with one line of JQuery that would take a lot of coding and debugging if you were to use raw JavaScript. Ultimately you will need an understanding of the underlying language to take full advantage of JQuery. The common trend among programming languages and libraries is that the library is always going to be slower because it is more code to run alongside your actual program. For better understanding, jQuery code $('#myId').hide(); means jquey talking about JavaScript document.getElementById('myId'). If you are concerned about performance , native getElementById is much much faster. jQuery has own layer which translate into native JavaScript , so definitely native JavaScript will be faster. However it doesn't always have to be faster as you could write some major mistakes that slow things down again. jQuery , on the other hand, has some amazing brains behind it, and relying on it to solve such problems are sufficiently powered to perform to the best.