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Brunch

96
126
+ 1
40
Webpack

42.3K
26.3K
+ 1
750
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Brunch vs Webpack: What are the differences?

Brunch: Ultra-fast HTML5 build tool. Brunch is an assembler for HTML5 applications. It's agnostic to frameworks, libraries, programming, stylesheet & templating languages and backend technology; 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.

Brunch and Webpack can be categorized as "JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners" tools.

"Easy and awesome" is the primary reason why developers consider Brunch over the competitors, whereas "Most powerful bundler" was stated as the key factor in picking Webpack.

Brunch and Webpack are both open source tools. It seems that Webpack with 49.5K GitHub stars and 6.22K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Brunch with 6.58K GitHub stars and 461 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Webpack has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2181 company stacks & 1297 developers stacks; compared to Brunch, which is listed in 14 company stacks and 9 developer stacks.

Decisions about Brunch and Webpack
Rob Murphy
Chose
ViteVite
over
WebpackWebpack
at
()

The developer experience Webpack gave us was not delighting anyone. It works and is stable and consistent. It is also slow and frustrating. We decided to check out Vite as an alternative when moving to Vue 3 and have been amazed. It is very early in development and there are plenty of rough edges, but it has been a breath of fresh air not waiting for anything to update. It is so fast we have found ourselves using devtools in browser less because changing styles is just as fast in code. We felt confident using the tool because although it is early in its development, the production build is still provided by Rollup which is a mature tool. We also felt optimistic that as good as it is right now, it will only continue to get better, as it is being worked on very actively. So far we are really happy with the choice.

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Aleksandr Filatov
Contract Software Engineer - Microsoft · | 4 upvotes · 269.8K 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.
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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.

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Pros of Brunch
Pros of Webpack
  • 13
    Easy and awesome
  • 9
    Ultra Fast
  • 9
    Light Configuration
  • 4
    Built-in dev server with live reload
  • 3
    Simple to use
  • 2
    Has many pre-configurable framework "skeletons"
  • 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 Brunch
Cons of Webpack
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 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 Brunch?

    Brunch is an assembler for HTML5 applications. It's agnostic to frameworks, libraries, programming, stylesheet & templating languages and backend technology.

    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!

    What companies use Brunch?
    What companies use Webpack?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Brunch or Webpack.
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    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with Brunch?
    What tools integrate with Webpack?

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

    What are some alternatives to Brunch and Webpack?
    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.
    Parcel
    Parcel is a web application bundler, differentiated by its developer experience. It offers blazing fast performance utilizing multicore processing, and requires zero configuration.
    Grunt
    The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort.
    rollup
    It is a module bundler for JavaScript which compiles small pieces of code into something larger and more complex, such as a library or application. It uses the new standardized format for code modules included in the ES6 revision of JavaScript, instead of previous idiosyncratic solutions such as CommonJS and AMD.
    Vite
    It is an opinionated web dev build tool that serves your code via native ES Module imports during dev and bundles it with Rollup for production.
    See all alternatives