Backpack vs Grunt

Overview

Grunt

Stacks8.8K

Followers5.6K

Votes697

GitHub Stars12.3K

Forks1.5K

Backpack

Stacks14

Followers67

Votes14

Backpack vs Grunt: What are the differences?

Developers describe Backpack as "Build Node.js backends with Webpack". Backpack is minimalistic build system for Node.js. Inspired by Facebook's create-react-app, Zeit's Next.js, and Remy's Nodemon, Backpack lets you create modern Node.js apps and services with zero configuration. Backpack handles all the file-watching, live-reloading, transpiling, and bundling, so you don't have to. On the other hand, Grunt is detailed as "The JavaScript Task Runner". The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort.

Backpack and Grunt belong to "JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners" category of the tech stack.

"Great docs" is the top reason why over 2 developers like Backpack, while over 287 developers mention "Configuration " as the leading cause for choosing Grunt.

Backpack and Grunt are both open source tools. Grunt with 11.9K GitHub stars and 1.55K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Backpack with 4.14K GitHub stars and 174 GitHub forks.

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Advice on Grunt, Backpack

António

Apr 13, 2021

Decided

Very simple to use and a great way to optimize repetitive tasks, like optimize PNG images, convert to WebP, create sprite images with CSS.

I didn't choose Grunt because of the fact it uses files and Gulp uses memory, making it faster for my use case since I need to work with 3000+ small images. And the fact Gulp has 32k+ stars on GitHub.

38.5k views38.5k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Grunt	Backpack
The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort.	Backpack is minimalistic build system for Node.js. Inspired by Facebook's create-react-app, Zeit's Next.js, and Remy's Nodemon, Backpack lets you create modern Node.js apps and services with zero configuration. Backpack handles all the file-watching, live-reloading, transpiling, and bundling, so you don't have to.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 12.3K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 1.5K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 8.8K	Stacks 14
Followers 5.6K	Followers 67
Votes 697	Votes 14
Pros & Cons
Pros 288 Configuration 176 Open source 166 Automation of minification and live reload 60 Great community 7 SASS compilation Cons 1 Poor mindshare/community support	Pros 6 Great docs 4 Easy setup 4 Zero-config
Integrations
No integrations available	Node.js ES6 JavaScript Webpack

What are some alternatives to Grunt, Backpack?

gulp

Build system automating tasks: minification and copying of all JavaScript files, static images. More capable of watching files to automatically rerun the task when a file changes.

Webpack

A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.

Brunch

Brunch is an assembler for HTML5 applications. It's agnostic to frameworks, libraries, programming, stylesheet & templating languages and backend technology.

Parcel

Parcel is a web application bundler, differentiated by its developer experience. It offers blazing fast performance utilizing multicore processing, and requires zero configuration.

rollup

It is a module bundler for JavaScript which compiles small pieces of code into something larger and more complex, such as a library or application. It uses the new standardized format for code modules included in the ES6 revision of JavaScript, instead of previous idiosyncratic solutions such as CommonJS and AMD.

Vite

It is an opinionated web dev build tool that serves your code via native ES Module imports during dev and bundles it with Rollup for production.

Pingy CLI

Gulp and Grunt and other heavyweight build tools are great for complicated build workflows. Sometimes you want something simpler that doesn't take lots of configuration to get up and running. That's Pingy CLI.

Microbundle

Zero-configuration bundler for tiny modules, powered by Rollup.

System.js

It is a Universal Module Loader for JavaScript. If you've used RequireJs or a CommonJs bundler in the past, you have probably created modules.Configurable module loader enabling dynamic ES module workflows in browsers and NodeJS.

Esbuild

It is an extremely fast JavaScript and CSS bundler and minifier. Current build tools for the web are 10-100x slower than they could be. The main goal of this project is to bring about a new era of build tool performance, and create an easy-to-use modern bundler along the way.

Related Comparisons

"Great docs" is the top reason why over 2 developers like Backpack, while over 287 developers mention "Configuration " as the leading cause for choosing Grunt.

Backpack vs Grunt