If people are going to go to one of our competitors, it's usually Date-fns. It's a quality library, but it doesn't have a date parser. I personally think that this is an essential part of a javascript date library given how unreliable the JS date parser is, but then I do maintain Moment. JS Joda is another option that recently came on the scene. That one is worth checking out, as it ports JodaTime, which is a sweet library, to JavaScript.