I worked extensively with sails.js about three years ago and it was an unmitigated disaster. The ORM has about 1/8th of Rails' functionality and queries that would be trivial with Active Record were a nightmare. On top of that the community was a mess and around the end of that time, a lot of the core maintainers dropped out because there was so much in fighting.
Unless there have been some major changes I highly advise staying away from sails.js.
It's been about four years since we touched it. When we used Waterline (the Sails ORM), we discovered two distinct SQL injection vulnerabilities in it, without intentionally looking. I would link the related issues, but they seem to have disabled Github issues in the waterline repository[1]. That--and lots more--scared us away. We switched happily to Hapi[2] with about a week of work and never looked back.
The major stable version came with a lot of improvements.
I'm not saying sails.js is the best option for a big project, but is pretty decent for prototypes and fast development.
That was the promise. The reality is sails never really took off, fighting within the core team derailed development and fractured the community, and its opinions are so poorly documented that you basically have to learn it from reading the source. The founder will occasionally chime in and say that it's still alive, and his company has great success using it, but unless you are one of the core maintainers I doubt you will have a similar experience. There are very few people that have used sails in production that would recommend it. The author is undoubtedly a brilliant developer and light years beyond my own skill, but that does not matter when the community is tiny and bugs never get fixed.
I haven’t used sails in production, but I have tried in on a side project and it definitely was a disaster. We just started using Nest at work, which is a TypeScript framework that feels sort of like spring. It’s been nothing short of great, and typeorm is BY FAR the best orm in the node ecosystem.
I used it in production for 2 years w/ MongoDB and it worked fine for fast development. At the time the main knowledge resource was the Manning book "Sails.js in Action".
https://sailsjs.com/