Bower vs Yeoman: 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; Yeoman: A set of tools for automating development workflow. Yeoman is a robust and opinionated set of tools, libraries, and a workflow that can help developers quickly build beautiful, compelling web apps. It is comprised of yo - a scaffolding tool using our generator system, grunt - a task runner for your build process and bower for dependency management.

Bower can be classified as a tool in the "Front End Package Manager" category, while Yeoman is grouped under "Front End Scaffolding Tools".

Some of the features offered by Bower are:

• 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.

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

• Lightning-fast scaffolding — Easily scaffold new projects with customizable templates (e.g HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap), RequireJS and more.
• Great build process — Not only do you get minification and concatenation
• I also optimize all your image files, HTML, compile your CoffeeScript and Compass files, if you're using AMD, I will pass those modules through r.js so you don't have to.

"Package management", "Open source" and "Simple" are the key factors why developers consider Bower; whereas "Lightning-fast scaffolding", "Automation" and "Great build process" are the primary reasons why Yeoman is favored.

Bower and Yeoman are both open source tools. It seems that Bower with 15.2K GitHub stars and 1.97K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Yeoman with 9.23K GitHub stars and 759 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Bower has a broader approval, being mentioned in 803 company stacks & 395 developers stacks; compared to Yeoman, which is listed in 205 company stacks and 201 developer stacks.