Parcel vs Webpack

Overview

Webpack

Stacks45.0K

Followers28.1K

Votes752

GitHub Stars65.7K

Forks9.2K

Parcel

Stacks874

Followers250

Votes18

GitHub Stars44.0K

Forks2.3K

Parcel vs Webpack: What are the differences?

Parcel and Webpack are both popular bundling tools used in web development. Here are some key differences between the two.

Configuration: Webpack requires a configuration file (webpack.config.js) to define its behavior, whereas Parcel does not require any configuration by default. Parcel automatically detects and bundles the required assets without the need for explicit configuration, making it easier and quicker to set up.
Zero Configuration: As mentioned earlier, Parcel does not require any configuration by default, making it a good choice for beginners or for simple projects where ease of use is a priority. On the other hand, Webpack offers more customization options through its configuration file, allowing developers to fine-tune the bundling process to suit specific project requirements.
Asset Types: Webpack is more versatile when it comes to handling different types of assets. It provides loaders for various file types, like JavaScript, CSS, images, and fonts, enabling developers to process and optimize these assets. Parcel, on the other hand, supports a wide range of asset types out-of-the-box without the need for additional configuration or loaders.
Hot Module Replacement (HMR): HMR is a feature that allows developers to update the modules in the browser without refreshing the entire page. While both Parcel and Webpack support HMR, Webpack provides more fine-grained control and customization options over how the updates are handled. Webpack allows developers to define custom HMR behavior through Hot Module Replacement API, whereas Parcel handles HMR automatically without requiring any additional configuration.
Performance: Parcel is often praised for its fast bundling speed, especially for small to medium-sized projects. It achieves this by utilizing caching and parallelizing the bundling process. Webpack, on the other hand, offers more advanced optimization techniques like tree-shaking and code-splitting, which are beneficial for larger and more complex projects, but may impact build times.
Community and Ecosystem: Webpack has been around for a longer time and has a larger and more mature ecosystem. It has a wide range of plugins and loaders available, allowing developers to extend its functionality according to their needs. The community support and documentation for Webpack are also extensive. Parcel, while gaining popularity, has a smaller ecosystem compared to Webpack, which means fewer choices when it comes to extending or customizing the build pipeline.

In summary, Parcel offers zero-configuration setup and faster bundling speed, making it great for simple projects or beginners, while Webpack provides more advanced customization options, better support for different asset types, and a larger community ecosystem, making it suitable for more complex projects.

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CLI (Node.js)

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Advice on Webpack, Parcel

Aleksandr

Contract Software Engineer - Microsoft at Microsoft-365

Dec 23, 2019

Decided

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.

301k views301k

Comments

Rob

Tech Lead at Runa

Mar 15, 2021

Decided

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.

55.8k views55.8k

Comments

Abigail

Dec 10, 2019

Decided

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.

224k views224k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Webpack	Parcel
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 is a web application bundler, differentiated by its developer experience. It offers blazing fast performance utilizing multicore processing, and requires zero configuration.
Bundles ES Modules, CommonJS, and AMD modules (even combined); Can create a single bundle or multiple chunks that are asynchronously loaded at runtime (to reduce initial loading time); Dependencies are resolved during compilation, reducing the runtime size; Loaders can preprocess files while compiling, e.g. TypeScript to JavaScript, Handlebars strings to compiled functions, images to Base64, etc; Highly modular plugin system to do whatever else your application requires	Blazing fast bundle times; Bundle all your assets; Automatic transforms; Zero config code splitting; Hot module replacement; Friendly error logging
Statistics
GitHub Stars 65.7K	GitHub Stars 44.0K
GitHub Forks 9.2K	GitHub Forks 2.3K
Stacks 45.0K	Stacks 874
Followers 28.1K	Followers 250
Votes 752	Votes 18
Pros & Cons
Pros 309 Most powerful bundler 182 Built-in dev server with livereload 142 Can handle all types of assets 87 Easy configuration 22 Laravel-mix Cons 15 Hard to configure 5 No clear direction 2 SystemJS integration is quite lackluster 2 Spaghetti-Code out of the box 2 Fire and Forget mentality of Core-Developers	Pros 10 Zero configuration 8 Built-in dev server with livereload Cons 3 Lack of documentation
Integrations
JavaScript	JavaScript

What are some alternatives to Webpack, Parcel?

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.

Brunch

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

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.

Backpack

Backpack is minimalistic build system for Node.js. Inspired by Facebook's create-react-app, Zeit's Next.js, and Remy's Nodemon, Backpack lets you create modern Node.js apps and services with zero configuration. Backpack handles all the file-watching, live-reloading, transpiling, and bundling, so you don't have to.

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.

Pingy CLI

Gulp and Grunt and other heavyweight build tools are great for complicated build workflows. Sometimes you want something simpler that doesn't take lots of configuration to get up and running. That's Pingy CLI.

Microbundle

Zero-configuration bundler for tiny modules, powered by Rollup.

System.js

It is a Universal Module Loader for JavaScript. If you've used RequireJs or a CommonJs bundler in the past, you have probably created modules.Configurable module loader enabling dynamic ES module workflows in browsers and NodeJS.

Esbuild

It is an extremely fast JavaScript and CSS bundler and minifier. Current build tools for the web are 10-100x slower than they could be. The main goal of this project is to bring about a new era of build tool performance, and create an easy-to-use modern bundler along the way.

Related Comparisons

Parcel vs Webpack: What are the differences?

Parcel and Webpack are both popular bundling tools used in web development. Here are some key differences between the two.

Configuration: Webpack requires a configuration file (webpack.config.js) to define its behavior, whereas Parcel does not require any configuration by default. Parcel automatically detects and bundles the required assets without the need for explicit configuration, making it easier and quicker to set up.
Zero Configuration: As mentioned earlier, Parcel does not require any configuration by default, making it a good choice for beginners or for simple projects where ease of use is a priority. On the other hand, Webpack offers more customization options through its configuration file, allowing developers to fine-tune the bundling process to suit specific project requirements.
Asset Types: Webpack is more versatile when it comes to handling different types of assets. It provides loaders for various file types, like JavaScript, CSS, images, and fonts, enabling developers to process and optimize these assets. Parcel, on the other hand, supports a wide range of asset types out-of-the-box without the need for additional configuration or loaders.
Hot Module Replacement (HMR): HMR is a feature that allows developers to update the modules in the browser without refreshing the entire page. While both Parcel and Webpack support HMR, Webpack provides more fine-grained control and customization options over how the updates are handled. Webpack allows developers to define custom HMR behavior through Hot Module Replacement API, whereas Parcel handles HMR automatically without requiring any additional configuration.
Performance: Parcel is often praised for its fast bundling speed, especially for small to medium-sized projects. It achieves this by utilizing caching and parallelizing the bundling process. Webpack, on the other hand, offers more advanced optimization techniques like tree-shaking and code-splitting, which are beneficial for larger and more complex projects, but may impact build times.
Community and Ecosystem: Webpack has been around for a longer time and has a larger and more mature ecosystem. It has a wide range of plugins and loaders available, allowing developers to extend its functionality according to their needs. The community support and documentation for Webpack are also extensive. Parcel, while gaining popularity, has a smaller ecosystem compared to Webpack, which means fewer choices when it comes to extending or customizing the build pipeline.

Parcel vs Webpack

Overview