Microbundle VS Snowpack

Compare Microbundle vs Snowpack and see what are their differences.

Microbundle

📦 Zero-configuration bundler for tiny modules. (by developit)

Snowpack

ESM-powered frontend build tool. Instant, lightweight, unbundled development. ✌️ [Moved to: https://github.com/FredKSchott/snowpack] (by withastro)
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Microbundle Snowpack
20 69
8,102 19,787
0.1% -
2.2 8.4
3 months ago about 3 years ago
JavaScript JavaScript
MIT License MIT License
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.

Microbundle

Posts with mentions or reviews of Microbundle. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-04-03.
  • Monorepo Tutorial With Lerna, Storybook & Next.js
    7 projects | dev.to | 3 Apr 2025
    We’ll also use Microbundle for bundling our modules. Let’s create the package using Lerna:
  • mangle.json in Preact source code.
    2 projects | dev.to | 5 Mar 2025
    This definition is tailored to microbundle but the tldr is property names can have large impact on size .
  • How to Build and Publish Your First React NPM Package
    8 projects | dev.to | 9 Jun 2023
    To begin, you need to prepare your environment. A few ways to build a React package include tools like Bit, Storybook, Lerna, and TSDX. However, for this tutorial, you will use a zero-configuration bundler for tiny modules called Microbundle.
  • micro-ts , a minimalist template to build packages with TypeScript
    3 projects | /r/Frontend | 14 Feb 2023
    I discovered microbundle lately, and I would like to share with you a mini template with the bare essentials and comfort to develop your packages with TypeScript.
  • How to create a component library?
    3 projects | /r/reactjs | 28 Dec 2022
  • How do I properly learn Typescript?
    2 projects | /r/typescript | 30 Mar 2022
    For package authoring - microbundle is a handy boilerplate (I would avoid tsdx personally - it’s basically been abandoned for turborepo but that’s not apparent at first glance).
  • What I learned from making my first OSS NPM package/Component Library
    9 projects | /r/learnprogramming | 12 Mar 2022
    My tech stack was React + Typescript, Storybook for docs, vite.js for build instead of webpack, microbundle for bundling (basically a no-config rollup wrapper), and Google's release please bot for handling release/deployment.
  • Microbundle is not enough
    2 projects | dev.to | 14 Feb 2022
    Setting up a modern Typescript or Javascript development stack is a daunting task, there are a lot of moving parts, and sometimes the whole process seems like magic, so I switched to Microbundle. While microbundle handles the compilation, there are a lot of other moving parts that need to be set up to start developing with Nodejs/Typescript (CI, tests, linting, etc). So I've created an opinionated template repository with Typescript, Microbundle, Jest, eslint, husky, prettier, github actions, pnpm, and a bunch of other scripts. It enables me to start developing a library immediately by using the repository as a starter template. Let me know what you think and if some processes could be improved, or some valuable tools that could be added. Pull requests and suggestions are welcomed.
  • Creating a react library, why bundle to ESM?
    3 projects | /r/reactjs | 13 Dec 2021
    I would recommend starting by using https://github.com/developit/microbundle , as it has pretty good default behavior for generating library output.
  • Beginner's Thread / Easy Questions (November 2021)
    5 projects | /r/reactjs | 2 Nov 2021
    Check out microbundle, which is what TSDX started as a typescript alternative to.

Snowpack

Posts with mentions or reviews of Snowpack. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-03-25.
  • How to replace webpack & babel with Vite on a legacy React Typescript project
    11 projects | dev.to | 25 Mar 2022
    Then there was Webpack which seemed like it would be around for a while. Even after things like Parcel and Snowpack came on the scene people still recommended Webpack. I mean, it's still the backbone of create-react-app. An then, Vite was released.
  • State of the Web: Bundlers & Build Tools
    17 projects | dev.to | 23 Jan 2022
    Unbundled development utilizes native ESM support in browsers to offer an ultra-fast development experience. Unlike a traditional bundler which bundles everything in development, unbundled development transforms the code and rewrites import paths to the ESM compliant file path without bundling your code. Additionally, most bundlers that do this pre-bundle dependencies because that decreases the number of imports needed, and dependencies are unlikely to change often. The two most prominent bundlers that utilize unbundled development are Vite and Snowpack. Snowpack, created in 2019, was the first bundler to have an unbundled development experience. However, while Snowpack was popular for some time, this did not last forever. In 2020, the team behind Vue created Vite. Vite has many advantages over Snowpack, like the ease of use, speed, better optimization, and more. Additionally, popular projects like SvelteKit adopted Vite instead of Snowpack. All of this helped Vite pass Snowpack in downloads, and it now has more than 10x downloads compared to Snowpack. In fact, even Astro, a project created by the team behind Snowpack (be on the lookout for an article about Astro), is now using Vite. Overall, if you want fast, unbundled development, I recommend Vite.
  • What are the new and exciting tech for React projects for 2022?
    16 projects | /r/reactjs | 5 Jan 2022
    I've been hearing good things about snowpack and have been wanting to give it a go myself as an alternative to webpack/babel
  • Converting to Vite (Part 1)
    4 projects | dev.to | 5 Jan 2022
    So how did we get here? Well, it's a good thing to describe alternatives considered when you add issues to a repo! Months ago, @0vortex described in Issue #1131 some opportunities for dependency updates that would require version 5 of webpack with our webpack configuration, and warned that the dependency management would probably be tricky. I fixated on an alternative that he mentioned about converting the project to use Snowpack. I had wanted to learn more about bundling tools, so I took a few days here and there after Thanksgiving and got Open Sauced mostly working with it (see PR #1320).
  • npx create-react-app not working -- everything is deprecated
    5 projects | /r/react | 11 Dec 2021
  • React 101: The Basics
    12 projects | dev.to | 30 Nov 2021
    I have written a post about setting up a React project using Parcel as a bundler which can give a more detailed walkthrough about getting a React application up and running from scratch. There are multiple ways to do this but some of the more common build tools include Webpack, Parcel, and Snowpack.
  • SolidJS on Snowpack – Quick Dev Guide
    2 projects | dev.to | 17 Nov 2021
    For more information about this issue, check these issue tickets: Issue 2998, Issue 3219, Issue 3243
  • Etsy’s Journey to TypeScript
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Nov 2021
  • Build your own component library with Svelte
    10 projects | dev.to | 9 Nov 2021
    SvelteKit uses Vite under the hood, which is quite surprising, as Sapper and most tools are developed using Snowpack. Vite 2 is framework-agnostic and designed with SSR at its core.
  • Angular Is Rotten to the Core
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Nov 2021
    I've had some success with npm, snowpack, mocha, typescript as that sort of stack for more "vanilla" efforts that feel rather more "modern". I think mocha is easier and cleaner than jest. I like keeping all of my transpilation to just Typescript without needing a massive Babel install/pipeline. snowpack (https://www.snowpack.dev/) right now I think is in a sweet spot of a better "ES Module native" developer experience than webpack and has better defaults when left unconfigured. (So much so that while there are snowpack templates/generators provided by the project I mostly don't use them other than for reference.)

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Microbundle and Snowpack you can also consider the following projects:

Rollup - Next-generation ES module bundler

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.

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

Speed Measure Plugin - ⏱ See how fast (or not) your plugins and loaders are, so you can optimise your builds

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Civic Auth - Auth in Less Than 5 Minutes
Civic Auth comes with multiple SSO options, optional embedded wallets, and user management — all implemented with just a few lines of code. Start building today.
www.civic.com
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