Hi Dana,
There are many different frameworks for building web applications. You don't even need to compare it to Microsoft's solutions - in the Java world itself there are already many different frameworks.
One of the distinctive properties of JSF is that it's a
component-based framework. You create your web application out of reusable components, and you can use libraries containing ready-made components. A component can be almost any part of a JSF application, from just a button to for example a table with pagination and sorting features. There are a number of libraries available with JSF components, for example
PrimeFaces.
The advantages of this are that it gives you a way to organize your application and that it makes it easy to reuse parts. The disadvantages are that you generally have less control over the HTML pages that are sent to the browser - the components themselves produce the HTML, and if you need to customize the HTML or the styles (CSS) then that can be more complicated than with a framework where you work with the HTML more directly.
There are other component-based frameworks besides JSF, such as
Apache Wicket, but JSF is part of the Java EE standard.
There are also other web application frameworks which work in a different way. For example,
Spring Web MVC is an action-based framework instead of a component-based framework. With Spring Web MVC, you write the HTML for the web pages all yourself (using a template language such as Thymeleaf) and then you write controller methods to handle actions such as GET and POST requests to specific URLs. This is a bit more low-level than a component-based framework such as JSF.