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Parcel

569
235
+ 1
18
Webpack

37.3K
25.2K
+ 1
750
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Parcel vs Webpack: What are the differences?

Developers describe Parcel as "📦🚀 A fast, zero configuration web application bundler". Parcel is a web application bundler, differentiated by its developer experience. It offers blazing fast performance utilizing multicore processing, and requires zero configuration. On the other hand, Webpack is detailed as "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.

Parcel and Webpack belong to "JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners" category of the tech stack.

Parcel 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 Parcel with 32.3K GitHub stars and 1.47K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Webpack has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2206 company stacks & 1338 developers stacks; compared to Parcel, which is listed in 10 company stacks and 9 developer stacks.

Decisions about Parcel and Webpack
Rob Murphy

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 · 178.7K 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 Parcel
Pros of Webpack
  • 10
    Zero configuration
  • 8
    Built-in dev server with livereload
  • 308
    Most powerful bundler
  • 182
    Built-in dev server with livereload
  • 142
    Can handle all types of assets
  • 87
    Easy configuration
  • 22
    Laravel-mix
  • 4
    Overengineered, Underdeveloped
  • 2
    Webpack-Encore
  • 2
    Makes it easy to bundle static assets
  • 1
    Better support in Browser Dev-Tools
  • 1
    Redundant

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Cons of Parcel
Cons of Webpack
  • 3
    Lack of documentation
  • 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

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What is Parcel?

Parcel is a web application bundler, differentiated by its developer experience. It offers blazing fast performance utilizing multicore processing, and requires zero configuration.

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.

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What companies use Parcel?
What companies use Webpack?
See which teams inside your own company are using Parcel or Webpack.
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What tools integrate with Parcel?
What tools integrate with Webpack?

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What are some alternatives to Parcel and Webpack?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Webpacker
Webpacker makes it easy to use the JavaScript preprocessor and bundler Webpack to manage application-like JavaScript in Rails. It coexists with the asset pipeline, as the purpose is only to use Webpack for app-like JavaScript, not images, css, or even JavaScript Sprinkles (that all continues to live in app/assets).
See all alternatives