Nowadays, almost every web developer uses one bundler or another. Currently, Vite is the fastest-growing major bundler adopted by many frameworks.
| Name | Stars | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Vite | 53k | A build tool that aims to provide a faster and leaner development experience for modern web projects. |
| SWC | 26k | Rust-based platform for both compilation and bundling, used by tools like Next.js, Parcel, and Deno. |
| Webpack | 62k | A static module bundler for modern JavaScript applications. |
| Parcel | 42k | On top of SWC, Parcel implements dependency collection, bundling, scope hoisting, tree shaking, Node emulation, hot reloading, and more. |
| Rollup | 23k | A module bundler for JavaScript which compiles small pieces of code into something larger and more complex, such as a library or application. |
| Esbuild | 34k | An extremely fast bundler for the web written in Go. |
| Babel | 42k | A compiler for writing next generation JavaScript. |
Even though native ESM is now widely supported, shipping unbundled ESM in production is still inefficient (even with HTTP/2) due to the additional network round trips caused by nested imports. To get the optimal loading performance in production, it is still better to bundle your code with tree-shaking, lazy-loading and common chunk splitting (for better caching).
While esbuild is extremely fast and is already a very capable bundler for libraries, some of the important features needed for bundling applications are still work in progress - in particular code-splitting and CSS handling. For the time being, Rollup is more mature and flexible in these regards.