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gulp vs Webpack: What are the differences?
What is gulp? The streaming build system. 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.
What is 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.
gulp and Webpack can be primarily classified as "JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners" tools.
"Build speed", "Readable" and "Code-over-configuration" are the key factors why developers consider gulp; 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.
gulp and Webpack are both open source tools. Webpack with 49.8K GitHub stars and 6.27K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than gulp with 31.3K GitHub stars and 4.41K GitHub forks.
Airbnb, Instagram, and Pinterest are some of the popular companies that use Webpack, whereas gulp is used by Mailgun, Sellsuki, and Movielala. Webpack has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2206 company stacks & 1338 developers stacks; compared to gulp, which is listed in 1163 company stacks and 705 developer stacks.
Very simple to use and a great way to optimize repetitive tasks, like optimize PNG images, convert to WebP, create sprite images with CSS.
I didn't choose Grunt because of the fact it uses files and Gulp uses memory, making it faster for my use case since I need to work with 3000+ small images. And the fact Gulp has 32k+ stars on GitHub.
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.
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 thannpm 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.
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.
Pros of gulp
- Build speed454
- Readable277
- Code-over-configuration244
- Open source210
- Node streams175
- Intuitive107
- Lots of plugins84
- Works great with browserify66
- Easy to Learn45
- Laravel-elixir17
- build workflow4
- Great community3
- Simple & flexible3
- Stylus intergration2
- jade intergration2
- Well documented0
- Clean Code0
Pros of Webpack
- Most powerful bundler308
- Built-in dev server with livereload182
- Can handle all types of assets142
- Easy configuration87
- Laravel-mix22
- Overengineered, Underdeveloped4
- Webpack-Encore2
- Makes it easy to bundle static assets2
- Better support in Browser Dev-Tools1
- Redundant1
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Cons of gulp
Cons of Webpack
- Hard to configure15
- No clear direction5
- Spaghetti-Code out of the box2
- SystemJS integration is quite lackluster2
- Loader architecture is quite a mess (unreliable/buggy)2
- Fire and Forget mentality of Core-Developers2