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Babel VS esbuild

Compare Babel VS esbuild and see what are their differences

Babel logo Babel

Babel is a compiler for writing next generation JavaScript.

esbuild logo esbuild

An extremely fast JavaScript bundler and minifier
  • Babel Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-02
  • esbuild Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-05-07

Babel videos

Babel - Movie Review

More videos:

  • Review - Day 16 | Babel Review | 365 Films
  • Review - Worth The Hype? - BABEL Review
  • Review - Book CommuniTEA: Is BABEL a rac1st mani!fest0? [you should know the answer]
  • Review - Babel is a Masterpiece, And Here's Why

esbuild videos

ESBuild and SWC: Worth your time?

More videos:

  • Review - Let's talk about esbuild
  • Tutorial - Introduction to ESBuild tutorial for React / JavaScript and Typescript bundling. Bye bye Webpack

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Babel and esbuild)
Development Tools
100 100%
0% 0
JS Build Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Javascript UI Libraries
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Babel might be a bit more popular than esbuild. We know about 134 links to it since March 2021 and only 124 links to esbuild. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Babel mentions (134)

  • How, and why, you should add JavaScript linting to your project. With ESLint and Gulp
    Some of the most popular JavaScript linting tools are ESLint, JSHint, JSLint and JSCS. We're going to be using ESLint. It’s very flexible, easy to use and has the best ES6 support, which will be helpful if we introduce more modern JavaScript (that will be transpiled for older browsers using https://babeljs.io/). All rules for ESLint can be found here: https://eslint.org/docs/rules/. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • What is Server Side Rendering (SSR) and Static Site Generation (SSG)?
    This simply extends the existing build process that many front-end frameworks have. After Babel's done with its transpilation, it merely executes code to compile your initial screen into static HTML and CSS. This isn't entirely dissimilar from how SSR hydrates your initial screen, but it's done at compile-time, not at request time. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Storybook 8 Beta
    First, we switched the default compiler for new projects from Babel to SWC (Speedy Web Compiler). SWC is dramatically faster than Babel and requires zero configuration. We’ll continue to support Babel in any project currently using it. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Nuxt vs Next: Which JavaScript Framework Suits Your Next Project?
    Nuxt.js is an open-source JavaScript framework built on Vue.js, Node.js, Vite, and Babel.js used for creating fast, cutting-edge applications. Nuxt.js possesses similar features to Next.js, with the major difference being the web framework it is compatible with. Next.js is a React framework whereas Nuxt.js is a Vue framework. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Abstract Syntax Trees and Practical Applications in JavaScript
    Disclaimer: If you've already developed Babel or ESLint plugins, this article may not be as beneficial for you, as you're likely already familiar with the majority of the content covered here. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
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esbuild mentions (124)

  • How to Start & Setup a React project in 2024 (7 Different Ways Based on Use Cases)
    Vite is currently the best build tool for bundling Front-end applications. It's so fast because it uses esbuild under the hood. Vite hot reload is the fastest among other development tools I have used. - Source: dev.to / 15 days ago
  • Rustify your JavaScript tooling
    A big part of my work revolves around JavaScript tooling, and as such it's important to keep an eye on the ecosystem and see where things are going. It's no secret that recently lots of projects are native-ying (??) parts of their codebase, or even rewriting them to native languages altogether. Esbuild is one of the first popular and successful examples of this, which was written in Go. Other examples are Rspack... - Source: dev.to / 16 days ago
  • Exploring Angular 17 and Beyond: Major Enhancements, Latest Updates, Migration Strategies, and Future Outlook
    Angular 17 introduces a significant performance boost by harnessing the capabilities of esbuild, a swift JavaScript bundler. This integration optimizes the build process, reducing build times and enhancing the overall performance of web applications developed with Angular. Developers can now expedite the application development cycle and deployment, leading to a more seamless development experience. - Source: dev.to / 19 days ago
  • How and why do we bundle zx?
    At first we wanted to just get rid of all the helper utilities. Keep only the kernel, but this would mean a loss of backward compatibility. We needed some efficient code processing instead with recomposition and tree-shaking. We needed a bundler. But which one? Our testing approach relies on targets, not sources. We rebuilt the project frequently, speed was critical requirement. In essence, we chose a solution... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Use Notion as your CMS along with Next.js
    During my search for deploying Lambdas via GitHub actions, I came across a tutorial that utilized ncc for converting TypeScript and bundling. While ncc is effective, I discovered esbuild, which proved to be significantly faster and perfectly suited to my requirements. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Babel and esbuild, you can also consider the following products

jQuery - The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library.

Vite - Next Generation Frontend Tooling

React Native - A framework for building native apps with React

Webpack - Webpack is a module bundler. Its main purpose is to bundle JavaScript files for usage in a browser, yet it is also capable of transforming, bundling, or packaging just about any resource or asset.

Composer - Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP.

rollup.js - Rollup is a module bundler for JavaScript which compiles small pieces of code into a larger piece such as application.