Grunt vs Webpacker

Overview

Grunt

Stacks8.8K

Followers5.6K

Votes697

GitHub Stars12.3K

Forks1.5K

Webpacker

Stacks204

Followers48

Votes0

GitHub Stars5.3K

Forks1.5K

Grunt vs Webpacker: What are the differences?

What is Grunt? 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.

What is Webpacker? Use Webpack to manage app-like JavaScript modules in Rails (by Rails). Webpacker makes it easy to use the JavaScript preprocessor and bundler Webpack to manage application-like JavaScript in Rails. It coexists with the asset pipeline, as the purpose is only to use Webpack for app-like JavaScript, not images, css, or even JavaScript Sprinkles (that all continues to live in app/assets).

Grunt and Webpacker can be primarily classified as "JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners" tools.

Grunt and Webpacker are both open source tools. It seems that Grunt with 11.9K GitHub stars and 1.55K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Webpacker with 4.29K GitHub stars and 893 GitHub forks.

Medium, Twitter, and Udemy are some of the popular companies that use Grunt, whereas Webpacker is used by Cambridge Brain Sciences, JetThoughts LLC, and Gratify Commerce. Grunt has a broader approval, being mentioned in 796 company stacks & 429 developers stacks; compared to Webpacker, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.

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Advice on Grunt, Webpacker

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	Webpacker
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.	Webpacker makes it easy to use the JavaScript preprocessor and bundler Webpack to manage application-like JavaScript in Rails. It coexists with the asset pipeline, as the purpose is only to use Webpack for app-like JavaScript, not images, css, or even JavaScript Sprinkles (that all continues to live in app/assets).
Statistics
GitHub Stars 12.3K	GitHub Stars 5.3K
GitHub Forks 1.5K	GitHub Forks 1.5K
Stacks 8.8K	Stacks 204
Followers 5.6K	Followers 48
Votes 697	Votes 0
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	No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available	Rails Webpack

What are some alternatives to Grunt, Webpacker?

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.

Backpack

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.

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.

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