Backbone.js is a frontend MVC framework that is lightweight and flexible, allowing integration into existing projects and adding structure to JavaScript. React.js is a UI library for building interactive, stateful components. Backbone.js uses models, views and controllers while React focuses only on views. Backbone.js has an initial learning curve while React uses a virtual DOM for efficient re-rendering. Both support building large, data-driven applications but React advocates a one-way data flow between stores and views.