Everyone is right. Learn both, remember each of these are tools. Once you learn them well you will know which is a better tool for what you are doing. Here is a real-life example from my experience: Project was built with PHP(MVC) and Ngnix(Apache alternative). Node.js was used for a real-time chat and comment system, previous used PHP. - Note Node.js is so much more but for the project it was easier to implement with node.js, and worked a lot better, than the previous php implementations(for us). I hope this helps.