Babel vs Bower

Overview

Bower

Stacks6.4K

Followers4.5K

Votes927

GitHub Stars14.9K

Forks1.8K

Babel

Stacks27.3K

Followers11.0K

Votes391

GitHub Stars43.8K

Forks5.8K

Babel vs Bower: What are the differences?

What is Babel? Use next generation JavaScript, today. Babel will turn your ES6+ code into ES5 friendly code, so you can start using it right now without waiting for browser support.

What is Bower? A package manager for the web. Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.

Babel and Bower are primarily classified as "JavaScript Compilers" and "Front End Package Manager" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Babel are:

Array comprehensions
Arrow functions
Async functions

On the other hand, Bower provides the following key features:

Bower operates at a lower level than previous attempts at client-side package management – such as Jam, Volo, or Ender. These managers could consume Bower as a dependency.
Bower's aim is simply to install packages, resolve dependencies from a bower.json, check versions, and then provide an API which reports on these things. Nothing more. This is a major diversion from past attempts at browser package management.
Bower offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of package management, while exposing an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack.

"Modern Javascript works with all browsers", "Open source" and "Integration with lots of tools" are the key factors why developers consider Babel; whereas "Package management", "Open source" and "Simple" are the primary reasons why Bower is favored.

Babel and Bower are both open source tools. It seems that Babel with 33.5K GitHub stars and 3.57K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Bower with 15.2K GitHub stars and 1.97K GitHub forks.

SendGrid, Sentry, and Yahoo! are some of the popular companies that use Babel, whereas Bower is used by MIT, Bodybuilding.com, and PedidosYa. Babel has a broader approval, being mentioned in 888 company stacks & 661 developers stacks; compared to Bower, which is listed in 803 company stacks and 393 developer stacks.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

Bower	Babel
Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.	Babel will turn your ES6+ code into ES5 friendly code, so you can start using it right now without waiting for browser support.
Bower operates at a lower level than previous attempts at client-side package management – such as Jam, Volo, or Ender. These managers could consume Bower as a dependency.;Bower's aim is simply to install packages, resolve dependencies from a bower.json, check versions, and then provide an API which reports on these things. Nothing more. This is a major diversion from past attempts at browser package management.;Bower offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of package management, while exposing an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack.	Array comprehensions; Arrow functions; Async functions; Async generator functions; Classes; Class properties; Computed property names; Constants; Decorators; Default parameters; Destructuring; Exponentiation operator; For-of; Generators; Generator comprehensions; Let scoping; Modules; Module export extensions; Object rest/spread; Property method assignment; Property name shorthand; Rest parameters; React; Spread; Tail call optimisation; Template literals; Type annotations; Unicode regex; JSX; React; Flow; Node.js; Meteor; Rails; Broccoli; Browserify; Require.js; Brunch; Duo; Gobble; Grunt; Gulp; Make; Webpack; Connect; Jade; Jest; Karma; Mocha; Nodemon
Statistics
GitHub Stars 14.9K	GitHub Stars 43.8K
GitHub Forks 1.8K	GitHub Forks 5.8K
Stacks 6.4K	Stacks 27.3K
Followers 4.5K	Followers 11.0K
Votes 927	Votes 391
Pros & Cons
Pros 483 Package management 214 Open source 142 Simple 53 Great for for project dependencies injection 27 Web components with Meteor Cons 2 Deprecated 1 Front end only	Pros 165 Modern Javascript works with all browsers 77 Open source 60 Integration with lots of tools 56 Easy setup 26 Very active on github
Integrations
No integrations available	Grunt Broccoli Browserify Brunch Duo gulp RequireJS

What are some alternatives to Bower, Babel?

Meteor

A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.

Elm

Writing HTML apps is super easy with elm-lang/html. Not only does it render extremely fast, it also quietly guides you towards well-architected code.

Julia

Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library.

Racket

It is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language based on the Scheme dialect of Lisp. It is designed to be a platform for programming language design and implementation. It is also used for scripting, computer science education, and research.

PureScript

A small strongly typed programming language with expressive types that compiles to JavaScript, written in and inspired by Haskell.

Composer

It is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you.

pnpm

It uses hard links and symlinks to save one version of a module only ever once on a disk. When using npm or Yarn for example, if you have 100 projects using the same version of lodash, you will have 100 copies of lodash on disk. With pnpm, lodash will be saved in a single place on the disk and a hard link will put it into the node_modules where it should be installed.

Bun

Develop, test, run, and bundle JavaScript & TypeScript projects—all with Bun. Bun is an all-in-one JavaScript runtime & toolkit designed for speed, complete with a bundler, test runner, and Node.js-compatible package manager.

Homebrew

Homebrew installs the stuff you need that Apple didn’t. Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local.

fpm

It helps you build packages quickly and easily (Packages like RPM and DEB formats).

Related Comparisons

Babel and Bower are primarily classified as "JavaScript Compilers" and "Front End Package Manager" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Babel are:

Array comprehensions
Arrow functions
Async functions

On the other hand, Bower provides the following key features:

Bower operates at a lower level than previous attempts at client-side package management – such as Jam, Volo, or Ender. These managers could consume Bower as a dependency.
Bower's aim is simply to install packages, resolve dependencies from a bower.json, check versions, and then provide an API which reports on these things. Nothing more. This is a major diversion from past attempts at browser package management.
Bower offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of package management, while exposing an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack.

Babel vs Bower