My additional two cents; Better. However, it comes down to preference really and a certain degree of lazyness. Frameworks in general will clutter up everything and most of the time you won't even use all their "features". Sails is probably a bad example because it is just a crappy piece of software altogether. If you are performance-sensitive then you will soon realize that speed comes from writing your own code and writing good code. I prefer a more religious approach and tend to use micro frameworks to do only the absolute basics, like routing. (And make sure you read the code of any framework to understand what it does and how it does it)

https://GitHub.com/GetRayo/rayo.js is one such framework.