Yeah, that’s a fair comparison — Dagger.js lives in a similar space to petite-vue / Alpine: no build step, HTML-first, sprinkle behaviors where you need them.

The main differences are:

pure declarative mode → there is zero API and third-party code & tool dependency.

Web Components first → you can wrap functionality as native Custom Elements and Dagger will happily coexist.

Directive model → simple +click, +load, etc., instead of reactivity syntax or x- attributes.

Distributed modules → small script modules you can drop in from a CDN when you need them.

So it’s playing the same role (buildless, quick internal tools / embeds), but with a slightly different philosophy: keep everything view-source-able and make WC interop a first-class story.