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Bower

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Browserify

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Bower vs Browserify: What are the differences?

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; Browserify: Browser-side require() the node.js way. Browserify lets you require('modules') in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies.

Bower and Browserify can be categorized as "Front End Package Manager" tools.

"Package management" is the top reason why over 482 developers like Bower, while over 73 developers mention "Node style browser code" as the leading cause for choosing Browserify.

Bower and Browserify are both open source tools. Bower with 15.2K GitHub stars and 1.97K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Browserify with 12.8K GitHub stars and 1.12K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Bower has a broader approval, being mentioned in 803 company stacks & 395 developers stacks; compared to Browserify, which is listed in 111 company stacks and 42 developer stacks.

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Pros of Bower
Pros of Browserify
  • 483
    Package management
  • 214
    Open source
  • 142
    Simple
  • 53
    Great for for project dependencies injection
  • 27
    Web components with Meteor
  • 8
    Portable dependencies Management
  • 75
    Node style browser code
  • 52
    Load modules installed by npm
  • 45
    Works great with gulp.js
  • 38
    NPM modules in the brower
  • 34
    Open source
  • 16
    Node streams
  • 1
    Easy setup

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Cons of Bower
Cons of Browserify
  • 2
    Deprecated
  • 1
    Front end only
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    What is Bower?

    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.

    What is Browserify?

    Browserify lets you require('modules') in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies.

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    What companies use Bower?
    What companies use Browserify?
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    What tools integrate with Bower?
    What tools integrate with Browserify?

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    What are some alternatives to Bower and Browserify?
    npm
    npm is the command-line interface to the npm ecosystem. It is battle-tested, surprisingly flexible, and used by hundreds of thousands of JavaScript developers every day.
    Yarn
    Yarn caches every package it downloads so it never needs to again. It also parallelizes operations to maximize resource utilization so install times are faster than ever.
    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.
    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.
    NuGet
    A free and open-source package manager designed for the Microsoft development platform. It is also distributed as a Visual Studio extension.
    See all alternatives