Backpack vs Webpacker: 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, Webpacker is detailed as "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).

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

Backpack and Webpacker are both open source tools. Webpacker with 4.29K GitHub stars and 893 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Backpack with 4.14K GitHub stars and 174 GitHub forks.