Yarn vs pnpm

Overview

Yarn

Stacks28.2K

Followers13.5K

Votes151

GitHub Stars41.5K

Forks2.7K

pnpm

Stacks338

Followers101

Votes11

GitHub Stars33.1K

Forks1.2K

Yarn vs pnpm: What are the differences?

Introduction

Yarn and pnpm are both package managers for JavaScript projects. While they serve similar purposes, there are key differences between the two.

Installation and Performance: Yarn uses a global cache to store packages, which allows for faster installation times and enables offline installation. On the other hand, pnpm uses a unique approach called "store" where packages are hard-linked, resulting in significant disk space savings but slower installation times compared to Yarn.
Memory Usage: Yarn requires more memory compared to pnpm. This is because Yarn needs to perform deduplication of dependencies in the file system, resulting in higher memory usage for large projects. Pnpm, on the other hand, uses a single virtual store for all projects, leading to lower memory footprint.
Parallel Installation: Yarn installs packages in parallel by default, which can speed up the installation process for large projects. Pnpm, however, has a configurable concurrency level, allowing developers to control the number of parallel installations. This flexibility provides more control over resource consumption.
Disk Space Usage: Yarn creates a full copy of each package in the package cache, which can consume a significant amount of disk space when dealing with a large number of dependencies. In contrast, pnpm uses a unique "store" mechanism that minimizes disk space usage by sharing common dependencies between projects, resulting in lower disk space requirements.
Compatibility: Yarn is compatible with the npm registry and can seamlessly work with projects that use npm as the package manager. pnpm, on the other hand, relies on the existence of a specific file structure and is not directly compatible with npm. This requirement may introduce restrictions when working with certain projects.
Community and Ecosystem: Yarn has a larger and more established community compared to pnpm. Yarn has been around for a longer time and has become the de facto package manager for many projects. pnpm, although gaining popularity, still has a smaller ecosystem and may have limited resources and support compared to Yarn.

In summary, Yarn and pnpm differ in their installation and performance approaches, memory usage, parallel installation capabilities, disk space usage, compatibility with npm, and community and ecosystem size.

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Advice on Yarn, pnpm

StackShare

Apr 23, 2019

Needs adviceon

Node.js

npm

Yarn

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

zen-li

Apr 24, 2019

Reviewon

Yarn

p.s.

I am not sure about the performance of the latest version of npm, whether it is different from my understanding of it below. Because I use npm very rarely when I had the following knowledge.

------⏬

I use Yarn because, first, yarn is the first tool to lock the version. Second, although npm also supports the lock version, when you use npm to lock the version, and then use package-lock.json on other systems, package-lock.json Will be modified. You understand what I mean, when you deploy projects based on Git...

250k views250k

Comments

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

Yarn	pnpm
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.	It uses hard links and symlinks to save one version of a module only ever once on a disk. When using npm or Yarn for example, if you have 100 projects using the same version of lodash, you will have 100 copies of lodash on disk. With pnpm, lodash will be saved in a single place on the disk and a hard link will put it into the node_modules where it should be installed.
-	Fast. As fast as npm and Yarn; Efficient. One version of a package is saved only ever once on a disk; Great for multi-package repositories (a.k.a. monorepos); See the recursive commands; Strict. A package can access only dependencies that are specified in its package.json; Deterministic. Has a lockfile called pnpm-lock.yaml; Works everywhere. Works on Windows, Linux and OS X; Aliases. Install different versions of the same package or import it using a different name.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 41.5K	GitHub Stars 33.1K
GitHub Forks 2.7K	GitHub Forks 1.2K
Stacks 28.2K	Stacks 338
Followers 13.5K	Followers 101
Votes 151	Votes 11
Pros & Cons
Pros 85 Incredibly fast 22 Easy to use 13 Open Source 11 Can install any npm package 8 Works where npm fails Cons 16 Facebook 7 Sends data to facebook 4 Should be installed separately 3 Cannot publish to registry other than npm	Pros 4 Fast 3 Uses less disk space 2 Works as a Node.js package manager 1 Has a nice UI 1 Has CLI auto-completion
Integrations
JavaScript npm	Linux macOS Windows

What are some alternatives to Yarn, pnpm?

Meteor

A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.

npm

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.

Bower

Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.

Elm

Writing HTML apps is super easy with elm-lang/html. Not only does it render extremely fast, it also quietly guides you towards well-architected code.

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.

Browserify

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

Julia

Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library.

Racket

It is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language based on the Scheme dialect of Lisp. It is designed to be a platform for programming language design and implementation. It is also used for scripting, computer science education, and research.

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.

PureScript

A small strongly typed programming language with expressive types that compiles to JavaScript, written in and inspired by Haskell.

Related Comparisons

Yarn vs pnpm: What are the differences?

Introduction

Yarn and pnpm are both package managers for JavaScript projects. While they serve similar purposes, there are key differences between the two.

Installation and Performance: Yarn uses a global cache to store packages, which allows for faster installation times and enables offline installation. On the other hand, pnpm uses a unique approach called "store" where packages are hard-linked, resulting in significant disk space savings but slower installation times compared to Yarn.
Memory Usage: Yarn requires more memory compared to pnpm. This is because Yarn needs to perform deduplication of dependencies in the file system, resulting in higher memory usage for large projects. Pnpm, on the other hand, uses a single virtual store for all projects, leading to lower memory footprint.
Parallel Installation: Yarn installs packages in parallel by default, which can speed up the installation process for large projects. Pnpm, however, has a configurable concurrency level, allowing developers to control the number of parallel installations. This flexibility provides more control over resource consumption.
Disk Space Usage: Yarn creates a full copy of each package in the package cache, which can consume a significant amount of disk space when dealing with a large number of dependencies. In contrast, pnpm uses a unique "store" mechanism that minimizes disk space usage by sharing common dependencies between projects, resulting in lower disk space requirements.
Compatibility: Yarn is compatible with the npm registry and can seamlessly work with projects that use npm as the package manager. pnpm, on the other hand, relies on the existence of a specific file structure and is not directly compatible with npm. This requirement may introduce restrictions when working with certain projects.
Community and Ecosystem: Yarn has a larger and more established community compared to pnpm. Yarn has been around for a longer time and has become the de facto package manager for many projects. pnpm, although gaining popularity, still has a smaller ecosystem and may have limited resources and support compared to Yarn.

Yarn vs pnpm

Overview

Yarn vs pnpm: What are the differences?