Rollup VS webpack

Vite is a modern frontend build tool used to develop fast and super efficient web applications. It serves files instantly and ensures that changes are updated immediately after they are implemented. It makes use of Rollup for optimized builds and has support for when you want to build a Javascript library (instead of a full app).

In 2025, mastering Vite for your React projects means leveraging powerful configurations, intelligent optimizations, and a robust plugin ecosystem. By understanding Vite’s modern architecture—native ES modules (ESM) during development and optimized Rollup bundling for production—you can significantly streamline your workflow, improve developer experience, and deliver fast, performant applications at scale.

6. Production-Ready Code Vite uses Rollup for production builds, which optimizes the code by bundling it efficiently, performing tree shaking, and minifying JavaScript. This results in smaller, optimized production builds that are ready for deployment.

Meanwhile, esbulid (developed in Go language, as introduced earlier) and rollup can also be used separately as packaging tools, and many third-party JS plugins are packaged using rollup.

npm packages dramatically sped up the productivity of developers by being able to leverage other developers' work. However, it had a major disadvantage: cjs was not compatible with web browsers. To solve this problem, the concept of bundlers was born. browserify was the first bundler which essentially worked by traversing an entry point and "bundling" all the require()-ed code into a single .js file compatible with web browsers. As time went on, other bundlers with additional features and differentiators were introduced. Most notably webpack, parcel, rollup, esbuild and vite (in chronological order).

Rollup is a module bundler for JavaScript which compiles small pieces of code into something larger and more complex, such as a library or application. Rollup Documentation

The JS SDK now lets you opt out of specific modules you don't need and optimize the final bundle size. You can do that by using either of two popular JavaScript build tools: Rollup or Webpack.

Rollup.js is a JavaScript module bundler that compiles small pieces of code into larger, more complex applications. It is particularly well-suited for bundling ES6 modules and is known for its efficient tree-shaking capabilities, which eliminate unused code from the final bundle, resulting in smaller file sizes.

Rollup bundles runtime artifacts.

This is also a valid approach, but what we really want is to be able to write our code in TypeScript and have it transpile into the JavaScript we need. Enter Rollup.

to then serve to the browser. If I was using something like Vite or Webpack I would have gotten this handling for free.

17. Webpack

The JS code gets transpiled by tools like Babel, then bundled (often by Webpack) into a single or few files (like bundle.js). This optimizes the website to load faster, as the browser can fetch everything from one file instead of multiple.

Remember that Webpack is highly configurable, and this article only scratches the surface of what's possible. Be sure to check the official Webpack documentation for more detailed information and advanced configurations.

Website: webpack.js.org

With Webpack 5, a new feature has helped microfrontends proliferate: Module Federation. Module Federation allows JavaScript code to be loaded — synchronously or asynchronously — at runtime.

Firefox: Extensions utilizing bundlers like webpack or Extension.js require zipped source code. Additionally, Firefox mandates submissions in Cross-Platform Install (XPI) format.

Webpack is one of the oldest and most widely used bundlers in web development, created by Tobias Koppers in 2012. It gained popularity after Browserify and RequireJS and has become the go-to choice for managing complex projects.

Micro-frontend has always aroused my curiosity: I wanted to understand how they work, how to build them, what their pros and cons are. In 2018, inspired by this topic, I tried to build something similar to single-spa in one of the pet projects. At that time, there was no Webpack Module Federation (WMF), and Webpack itself seemed inconvenient. The choice fell on ESBuild and importmap. Browser support for importmap at the time was mostly on paper or with special flags in browsers. For this reason, I used a polyfill. But, surprisingly, everything worked and even in several projects.

Packagers are the ones we most frequently come into contact with, such as Webpack Vite and Parcel. The latter may not be commonly used, but it is also a well-established tool.