Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Bower

6.4K
4.5K
+ 1
927
Webpack

42.5K
26.3K
+ 1
750
Add tool

Bower vs Webpack: 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; Webpack: A bundler for javascript and friends. 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.

Bower belongs to "Front End Package Manager" category of the tech stack, while Webpack can be primarily classified under "JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners".

"Package management", "Open source" and "Simple" are the key factors why developers consider Bower; whereas "Most powerful bundler", "Built-in dev server with livereload" and "Can handle all types of assets" are the primary reasons why Webpack is favored.

Bower and Webpack are both open source tools. It seems that Webpack with 49.8K GitHub stars and 6.27K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Bower with 15.2K GitHub stars and 1.97K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Webpack has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2209 company stacks & 1343 developers stacks; compared to Bower, which is listed in 803 company stacks and 395 developer stacks.

Decisions about Bower and Webpack
Aleksandr Filatov
Contract Software Engineer - Microsoft · | 4 upvotes · 268K views
Why migrated?

I could define the next points why we have to migrate:

  • Decrease build time of our application. (It was the main cause).
  • Also jspm install takes much more time than npm install.
  • Many config files for SystemJS and JSPM. For Webpack you can use just one main config file, and you can use some separate config files for specific builds using inheritance and merge them.
See more

We mostly use rollup to publish package onto NPM. For most all other use cases, we use the Meteor build tool (probably 99% of the time) for publishing packages. If you're using Node on FHIR you probably won't need to know rollup, unless you are somehow working on helping us publish front end user interface components using FHIR. That being said, we have been migrating away from Atmosphere package manager towards NPM. As we continue to migrate away, we may publish other NPM packages using rollup.

See more
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of Bower
Pros of Webpack
  • 483
    Package management
  • 214
    Open source
  • 142
    Simple
  • 53
    Great for for project dependencies injection
  • 27
    Web components with Meteor
  • 8
    Portable dependencies Management
  • 308
    Most powerful bundler
  • 181
    Built-in dev server with livereload
  • 142
    Can handle all types of assets
  • 87
    Easy configuration
  • 22
    Laravel-mix
  • 4
    Overengineered, Underdeveloped
  • 2
    Makes it easy to bundle static assets
  • 2
    Webpack-Encore
  • 1
    Redundant
  • 1
    Better support in Browser Dev-Tools

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Bower
Cons of Webpack
  • 2
    Deprecated
  • 1
    Front end only
  • 15
    Hard to configure
  • 5
    No clear direction
  • 2
    Spaghetti-Code out of the box
  • 2
    SystemJS integration is quite lackluster
  • 2
    Loader architecture is quite a mess (unreliable/buggy)
  • 2
    Fire and Forget mentality of Core-Developers

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

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 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.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Jobs that mention Bower and Webpack as a desired skillset
What companies use Bower?
What companies use Webpack?
See which teams inside your own company are using Bower or Webpack.
Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with Bower?
What tools integrate with Webpack?

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

What are some alternatives to Bower and Webpack?
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.
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.
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.
See all alternatives