esbuild VS swc

Compare esbuild vs swc and see what are their differences.

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esbuild swc
358 157
39,001 32,336
0.4% 0.6%
9.1 9.9
18 days ago 1 day ago
Go Rust
MIT License Apache License 2.0
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 2025-05-30.

swc

Posts with mentions or reviews of swc. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-05-26.
  • BookMS
    5 projects | dev.to | 26 May 2025
  • Rust Dependencies Scare Me
    23 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 May 2025
    I once wanted to contribute to the popular swc project (https://github.com/swc-project/swc). I cloned the repo, ran build, and a whooping 20GB was gone from my disk. The parser itself (https://github.com/swc-project/swc/blob/main/crates/swc_ecma...) has over a dozen dependencies, including serde.

    Meanwhile, the heaviest JavaScript parser implemented in JavaScript is more lightweight.

    I decided that I should leave this project alone and spend my time elsewhere.

  • A 10x Faster TypeScript
    38 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Mar 2025
    For previous attempts at doing this in rust, see:

      1. stc [https://github.com/dudykr/stc] - Abandoned [https://github.com/swc-project/swc/issues/571#issuecomment-1915966297]
  • Matanuska ADR 017 - Vitest, Vite, Grabthar, Oh My!
    11 projects | dev.to | 9 Feb 2025
    But I also had my Vitest build configured to use SWC, the compiler backend I had configured for Vitest, and it had issues of its own. SWC is cool. It's a TypeScript compiler written in Rust that is extremely fast, and - unlike tsc - it mostly handles rewriting import paths just fine. However, I did find that it rewrites index.mjs imports into directory imports.
  • Sprout: my submission for GitHub Copilot Challenge
    2 projects | dev.to | 20 Jan 2025
    @vitejs/plugin-react-swc uses SWC for Fast Refresh
  • Fresh Start: Unlocking New Beginnings with GitHub Copilot
    5 projects | dev.to | 10 Jan 2025
    # React + Vite This template provides a minimal setup to get React working in Vite with HMR and some ESLint rules. Currently, two official plugins are available: - [@vitejs/plugin-react](https://github.com/vitejs/vite-plugin-react/blob/main/packages/plugin-react/README.md) uses [Babel](https://babeljs.io/) for Fast Refresh - [@vitejs/plugin-react-swc](https://github.com/vitejs/vite-plugin-react-swc) uses [SWC](https://swc.rs/) for Fast Refresh # Fresh-Starts
  • How can VoidZero be commercialized?
    6 projects | dev.to | 22 Dec 2024
    Firstly, tools such as Vite and SWC cannot be used for a fee. There are too many products of the same type, so if you charge, everyone won't need to use them. Of course, being free does not mean it has no value. With more users, there is a great potential for natural value.
  • What is Evan You doing by creating VoidZero, and what are the issues with JS toolchains?
    15 projects | dev.to | 17 Dec 2024
    However, new tools such as SWC and esbulid now also support JS code compression, and their execution efficiency is higher. After all, Rust or Go inherently have much higher execution efficiency than JS.
  • Rewriting Rust
    23 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Sep 2024
    > Look at the dependency tree for a next

    Looks ok to me: https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=next

    Ironically, most of the dependencies are actually Rust crates used by swc and turbopack [1]. Try running cargo tree on either of those crates, it's enlightening to say the least. And of course, Node has a built in file watcher, and even the most popular third party package for file watching (Chokidar) has a single dependency [3].

    [1] https://github.com/vercel/turborepo/blob/main/Cargo.toml

    [2] https://github.com/swc-project/swc/blob/main/Cargo.toml

    [3] https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=chokidar

  • ts-blank-space is a fast type-stripping compiler
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Sep 2024
    It does!

    Node uses swc to do this. The swc implementation of blank-spacing (implemented here <https://github.com/swc-project/swc/pull/9144>) was inspired by the author of ts-blank-space here: <https://gist.github.com/acutmore/27444a9dbfa515a10b25f0d4707...>. It has just taken a little longer to release the original implementation.

What are some alternatives?

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

ncc - Compile a Node.js project into a single file. Supports TypeScript, binary addons, dynamic requires.

vitest - Next generation testing framework powered by Vite.

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

Rollup - Next-generation ES module bundler

ts-loader - TypeScript loader for webpack

InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
featured
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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