Nodemon.io VS chokidar

Compare Nodemon.io vs chokidar and see what are their differences.

Nodemon.io

Monitor for any changes in your node.js application and automatically restart the server - perfect for development (by remy)

chokidar

Minimal and efficient cross-platform file watching library (by paulmillr)
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Nodemon.io chokidar
149 27
26,538 11,377
0.2% 0.6%
7.8 8.6
8 days ago 13 days ago
JavaScript TypeScript
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.

Nodemon.io

Posts with mentions or reviews of Nodemon.io. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-03-11.
  • Build Content Management System with React and Node: Beginning Project Setup
    3 projects | dev.to | 11 Mar 2025
    We will need some help with the development process, that is why we will use nodemon. Nodemon is a utility tool that automatically monitors changes in your Node.js application's source code and restarts the server whenever it detects any modifications. This tool helps streamline the development process by eliminating the need to manually stop and restart the Node.js server every time you make changes to the code, making it easier to see the effects of your changes immediately. We will use "npm install --save-dev nodemon" to install nodemon to the development section of our project. Also, we need to add a new setting to the scripts part of the package.json file that will start nodemon.
  • ExpressJS
    3 projects | dev.to | 22 Feb 2025
  • 3 Node.js Features You Didn’t Know About
    2 projects | dev.to | 21 Jan 2025
    I’m sure you’ve used different tools to watch your source files and restart the application when you change your code. We’ve done this in various ways, one of which is using nodemon, a utility that monitors changes in your source files and automatically restarts the server.
  • Front-End to Full-Stack Journey Part 3: Server Proxies, React and Progress
    1 project | dev.to | 9 Jan 2025
    I installed Nodemon to help here. For those who don't know already, Nodemon is a tool that helps by restarting the Node application everytime a change has been made to the code. This proved to be quite helpful as the trial & error was about to begin.
  • CRUD with ExpressJS and MongoDB (Typescript)
    5 projects | dev.to | 28 Dec 2024
    Nodemon is a dependency that monitors your project files for changes and automatically restarts the server once there is a change to any file being watched by nodemon. Think of nodemon as node monitor ;). Note: You shouldn't use nodemon on a production server, except you're part of the developers that attempt fix bug in production, lol.
  • Build Your Own nodemon in Few Lines of Code
    2 projects | dev.to | 19 Oct 2024
    nodemon
  • Build a Real-time Notification System with Socket.IO and ReactJS
    7 projects | dev.to | 2 Oct 2024
    nodemon - automatically restarts our Node.js server whenever we make changes to the codebase
  • Node.js built-in alternative to nodemon
    1 project | dev.to | 31 Aug 2024
    The nodemon is a popular library for running and restarting Node.js processes on file changes. All LTS Node.js support an option --watch-path, which allows to replace nodemon:
  • How to Build an Application With Node.js
    4 projects | dev.to | 9 Aug 2024
    Or you can install nodemon for the same purpose. nodemon detects changes in the directory and restarts your application.
  • Using pm2 to Manage Node.js Applications
    1 project | dev.to | 2 Aug 2024
    When I first encountered Node.js and also learned how to use Linux, nodemon was a library that I often used to develop applications, as it would automatically "reload" the new code upon saving without needing to manually "kill" and restart the application, a feature now commonly referred to as "hot reload."

chokidar

Posts with mentions or reviews of chokidar. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-08-08.
  • Migrating from chokidar 3.x to 4.x
    1 project | dev.to | 17 Sep 2024
    A big win recently in the e18e space is that chokidar published a new 4.x version!
  • Chokidar 4.0
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Sep 2024
  • Boosting Rocket.Chat App Development with Hot Reload
    4 projects | dev.to | 8 Aug 2024
    I used the Chokidar library to watch for changes in the project directory. Chokidar detects file changes and triggers deployment commands automatically.
  • How to build a Web IDE like codesandbox?
    4 projects | dev.to | 16 Jun 2024
    We have a file explorer and a terminal, since files or directories could also be modified via terminal we need a way to communicate those changes to frontend. For this I made use of Chokidar, this package lets us setup file system watcher (nodemon also makes use of chokidar) and through following callbacks we can communicate file system changes.
  • The best testing setup for frontends, with Playwright and NextJS
    5 projects | dev.to | 18 Apr 2024
    For this, we'll use chokidar - more specifically the chokidar-cli package. chokidar is probably the most useful file watching library for the nodejs ecosystem and it will serve us well.
  • Why Does 'Is-Number' Package Have 59M Weekly Downloads?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Mar 2024
    tailwindcss -> chokidar -> braces -> fill-range -> to-regex-range -> is-number

    is-number was first published 9 years ago, when these kind of micro-packages were in vogue. braces was added as a dependency to chokidar over 6 years ago [1]. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I don't think the average JS dev today is going out and pulling in these deps.

    [1] https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar/commit/cbdf25563cfff7f...

  • How nodemon works?
    1 project | /r/node | 19 Aug 2023
    The watching magic is really in the https://www.npmjs.com/package/chokidar library
  • Dart 3.1 and a retrospective on functional style programming in Dart
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Aug 2023
    > It’s typical to listen to this stream of events and use chained if-else statements to determine an action based on the type of the events that occur.

    You'd think something like directory watching would have a clear set of events that would make nice objects with consistent meanings, but in my experience file watching gets crazy complicated, and can have all sorts of edge cases.

    Just take a looked here for all the various edge cases that crop up: https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar/issues

    Then you have linux, windows, macos, and maybe you want to abstract over some underlying implementation like chokidar vs fb/watchman vs webpack/watchpack. Every new OS release could also cause things to change.

    So usually its going to be a bunch of if-else statements hacked together to get around edge cases, and have to be revisited later on.

    Any attempt to abstract this into objects, just obfuscates things. And OO forces you to name things, when in fact they might be un-nameable. `FileSystemModifyEventExceptWhenXAndYAndSometimesZ`.

    The behavior might rely on a series of events together, so the object hierarchy must be re-worked.

    OO has this rosy idea that we just have to come up with the perfect hierarchy, but things change in unexpected ways, and everything must have a descriptive noun.

  • Is there anyway to auto reload the browser page when using express?
    2 projects | /r/learnjavascript | 13 Jun 2023
    Next, you can use a library like chokidar to listen for changes in your source directory. Create a ws server, and whenever a file changes, send a message.
  • How does nodemon works under the hood?
    4 projects | /r/node | 14 Mar 2023
    As another has mentioned, nodemon uses chokidar under the hood for the actual file watching part.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Nodemon.io and chokidar you can also consider the following projects:

PM2 - Node.js Production Process Manager with a built-in Load Balancer.

fs-extra - Node.js: extra methods for the fs object like copy(), remove(), mkdirs()

supervisor

rimraf - A `rm -rf` util for nodejs

forever - A simple CLI tool for ensuring that a given script runs continuously (i.e. forever)

globby - User-friendly glob matching

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