esbuild VS Rollup

Compare esbuild vs Rollup and see what are their differences.

Rollup

Next-generation ES module bundler (by rollup)
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esbuild Rollup
300 59
35,360 23,481
- 1.3%
9.7 9.7
7 days ago 4 days ago
Go JavaScript
MIT License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

esbuild

Posts with mentions or reviews of esbuild. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-09.

Rollup

Posts with mentions or reviews of Rollup. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-04-20.
  • Building a modern gRPC-powered microservice using Node.js, Typescript, and Connect
    15 projects | dev.to | 20 Apr 2023
    As we iterate on the definition, we are going to want a better developer experience for rebuilding the package on changes. Typically, for a “library” or “utility” style package, I’d reach for either unbuild’s stub concept or use esbuild/tsup/rollup to implement a more traditional watch/rebuild, but in this case, I’m watching a proto file that lives outsides of the source, which breaks assumptions of those tools.
  • Buildless workflow through import maps (featuring Lit, Shoelace and more)
    2 projects | dev.to | 12 Apr 2023
    As we can see, we have two external dependencies and one internal tool. In the modern way of packaging our application, we would be of course required to package this project using some bundler like ESBuild or Rollup. But with import maps, we can instead utilize CDN's to deliver our packages and completely eliminate the bundling step.
  • How are you building React applications? It's time to move on from Create React App
    13 projects | dev.to | 12 Apr 2023
    Vite has a great plugin ecosystem because it leverages the same plugin interface as Rollup, meaning most Rollup plugins are also compatible with Vite. The Vite guide offers more reasons for why you might want to check out Vite.
  • JavaScript Module Bundlers and all that Jazz ✨
    6 projects | dev.to | 26 Mar 2023
    Other popular build tools include Vite.js, Browserify, Rollup - The bundler behind vite.
  • React Server Components and Client Components with Rollup
    3 projects | dev.to | 18 Mar 2023
    Awhile back I wrote about packaging your JavaScript library code into a dual-module bundle (ESM + CommonJS) using Rollup module bundler. Make sure to check it out (it's been updated for Rollup v3!).
    3 projects | dev.to | 18 Mar 2023
    While searching for a solution, I came across this issue. Ironically, one of the suggested solutions in there was the initial solution described earlier above. However, there was also another suggestion.
  • The Complete Guide to User Authentication in Firebase
    2 projects | dev.to | 10 Feb 2023
    In this blog, we'll cover how to implement a simple login signup functionality using firebase. We'll be using modular JavaScript SDK, which (according to the documentation) provides a reduced SDK size and greater efficiency with modern JavaScript build tools such as Webpack or Rollup.
  • What is your ideal setup for new project for solo developers
    6 projects | reddit.com/r/node | 3 Feb 2023
    My go-to front end these days is Lit with web components, rollup, and web dev server.
  • How to use Firestore with Redux in a React application
    7 projects | dev.to | 25 Jan 2023
    With tools like webpack (used by create-react-app under the hood), your entire application needs to be bundled in a single file before it can be served to the browser. Vite, on the other hand, takes advantage of native ES modules in the browser to make bundling more efficient with Rollup, serving parts of the source code as needed.
  • Enhance your Docsify experience with your own plugin
    4 projects | dev.to | 9 Jan 2023
    We use Vite as a dev server. This allows you to take advantage of hot reloading in development and easily build and minify code with Rollup integration. Vitest is also provided, so you can write tests in the matching folder.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing esbuild and Rollup you can also consider the following projects:

swc - Rust-based platform for the Web

vite - Next generation frontend tooling. It's fast!

webpack - A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows for loading parts of the application on demand. Through "loaders", modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.

tsup - The simplest and fastest way to bundle your TypeScript libraries.

parcel - The zero configuration build tool for the web. 📦🚀

terser - 🗜 JavaScript parser, mangler and compressor toolkit for ES6+

ts-node - TypeScript execution and REPL for node.js

Tailwind CSS - A utility-first CSS framework for rapid UI development.

import-maps - How to control the behavior of JavaScript imports