StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Build Automation
  4. Front End Package Manager
  5. Portainer vs npm

Portainer vs npm

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

npm
npm
Stacks137.4K
Followers82.2K
Votes1.6K
GitHub Stars17.6K
Forks3.0K
Portainer
Portainer
Stacks507
Followers842
Votes146

npm vs Portainer: What are the differences?

npm: The package manager for JavaScript. 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; Portainer: Simple management UI for Docker. Portainer is an open-source lightweight management UI which allows you to easily manage your Docker environments Portainer is available on Windows, Linux and Mac. It has never been so easy to manage Docker !.

npm belongs to "Front End Package Manager" category of the tech stack, while Portainer can be primarily classified under "Container Tools".

"Best package management system for javascript" is the top reason why over 643 developers like npm, while over 29 developers mention "Simple" as the leading cause for choosing Portainer.

npm is an open source tool with 17.2K GitHub stars and 3.17K GitHub forks. Here's a link to npm's open source repository on GitHub.

reddit, Instacart, and Coursera are some of the popular companies that use npm, whereas Portainer is used by Viadeo, Betaout, and Bluestem Brands. npm has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2642 company stacks & 2666 developers stacks; compared to Portainer, which is listed in 23 company stacks and 18 developer stacks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on npm, Portainer

StackShare
StackShare

Apr 23, 2019

Needs adviceonNode.jsNode.jsnpmnpmYarnYarn

From a StackShare Community member: “I’m a freelance web developer (I mostly use Node.js) and for future projects I’m debating between npm or Yarn as my default package manager. I’m a minimalist so I hate installing software if I don’t need to- in this case that would be Yarn. For those who made the switch from npm to Yarn, what benefits have you noticed? For those who stuck with npm, are you happy you with it?"

294k views294k
Comments
Mark
Mark

CTO at Gemsotec bvba

Apr 25, 2019

ReviewonReactReactTypeScriptTypeScriptYarnYarn

I use npm because I also mainly use React and TypeScript. Since several typings (from DefinitelyTyped) depend on the React typings, Yarn tends to mess up which leads to duplicate libraries present (different versions of the same type definition), which hinders the Typescript compiler. Npm always resolves to a single version per transitive dependency. At least that's my experience with both.

251k views251k
Comments
Oleksandr
Oleksandr

Senior Software Engineer at joyn

Dec 7, 2019

Decided

As we have to build the application for many different TV platforms we want to split the application logic from the device/platform specific code. Previously we had different repositories and it was very hard to keep the development process when changes were done in multiple repositories, as we had to synchronize code reviews as well as merging and then updating the dependencies of projects. This issues would be even more critical when building the project from scratch what we did at Joyn. Therefor to keep all code in one place, at the same time keeping in separated in different modules we decided to give a try to monorepo. First we tried out lerna which was fine at the beginning, but later along the way we had issues with adding new dependencies which came out of the blue and were not easy to fix. Next round of evolution was yarn workspaces, we are still using it and are pretty happy with dev experience it provides. And one more advantage we got when switched to yarn workspaces that we also switched from npm to yarn what improved the state of the lock file a lot, because with npm package-lock file was updated every time you run npm install, frequent updates of package-lock file were causing very often merge conflicts. So right now we not just having faster dependencies installation time but also no conflicts coming from lock file.

310k views310k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

npm
npm
Portainer
Portainer

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.

It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code.

-
Docker management; Docker UI; Docker cluster management; Swarm visualizer; Authentication; User Access Control; Docker container management; Docker service management; Docker overview; Docker console; Docker swarm status; Docker image management; Docker network management; Docker dashboard; Remote HTTP API; Automation
Statistics
GitHub Stars
17.6K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
3.0K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
137.4K
Stacks
507
Followers
82.2K
Followers
842
Votes
1.6K
Votes
146
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 648
    Best package management system for javascript
  • 382
    Open-source
  • 327
    Great community
  • 148
    More packages than rubygems, pypi, or packagist
  • 112
    Nice people matter
Cons
  • 5
    Problems with lockfiles
  • 5
    Bad at package versioning and being deterministic
  • 3
    Node-gyp takes forever
  • 1
    Super slow
Pros
  • 36
    Simple
  • 27
    Great UI
  • 19
    Friendly
  • 12
    Easy to setup, gives a practical interface for Docker
  • 11
    Fully featured
Integrations
No integrations available
Docker Swarm
Docker Swarm
Docker Secrets
Docker Secrets
Auth0
Auth0
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Docker
Docker

What are some alternatives to npm, Portainer?

Kubernetes

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

Rancher

Rancher

Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.

Docker Compose

Docker Compose

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

RequireJS

RequireJS

RequireJS loads plain JavaScript files as well as more defined modules. It is optimized for in-browser use, including in a Web Worker, but it can be used in other JavaScript environments, like Rhino and Node. It implements the Asynchronous Module API. Using a modular script loader like RequireJS will improve the speed and quality of your code.

Docker Swarm

Docker Swarm

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

Browserify

Browserify

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

Tutum

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

Yarn

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.

Codefresh

Codefresh

Automate and parallelize testing. Codefresh allows teams to spin up on-demand compositions to run unit and integration tests as part of the continuous integration process. Jenkins integration allows more complex pipelines.

Component

Component

Component's philosophy is the UNIX philosophy of the web - to create a platform for small, reusable components that consist of JS, CSS, HTML, images, fonts, etc. With its well-defined specs, using Component means not worrying about most frontend problems such as package management, publishing components to a registry, or creating a custom build process for every single app.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana