webpack VS parcel

Compare webpack vs parcel and see what are their differences.

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. (by webpack)

parcel

The zero configuration build tool for the web. 📦🚀 (by parcel-bundler)
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webpack parcel
328 166
64,069 43,061
0.3% 0.3%
9.8 9.4
4 days ago 1 day 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.

webpack

Posts with mentions or reviews of webpack. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-25.
  • Creating Nx Workspace with Eslint, Prettier and Husky Configuration
    12 projects | dev.to | 25 Mar 2024
  • Google: Angular and Wiz Are Merging
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Mar 2024
    Thanks for the thorough answer!

    I confess I wasn't thinking about a particular build tool. My recent experience has been with Vite, where I took a similar approach to what you describe, but haven't had to dig deep into bundle performance because that's not a bottleneck for our application. The last time I did deeper work on the subject was years ago with Webpack.

    I thought Webpack at least did dead-code elimination before splitting things into chunks. If I'm reading this random GitHub issue[1] right (and the asker is also right), Webpack does partially behave as I expected, but the pre-chunking optimization pass occurs before things like constant expression evaluation.

    [1] https://github.com/webpack/webpack/issues/16672

  • JS Toolbox 2024: Bundlers and Test Frameworks
    10 projects | dev.to | 3 Mar 2024
    Webpack is a powerful and widely-used module bundler for JavaScript applications. It’s known for its flexibility and extensive plugin system, making it a popular tool in complex web development projects.
  • Webpack: The Web Module Bundler
    2 projects | dev.to | 2 Mar 2024
    Step 4: Now, we need to install two packages that is webpack and webpack-cli In Terminal, run the below command for installing this packages.
    2 projects | dev.to | 2 Mar 2024
    Thats all about Webpack Basic, there are lots of feature of webpack, You can check here: https://webpack.js.org/
  • How to improve page load speed and response times: A comprehensive guide
    8 projects | dev.to | 26 Feb 2024
    Many web pages use CSS and JavaScript files to handle various features and styles. Each file, however, requires a separate HTTP request, which can slow down page loading. Concatenation comes into play here. It involves combining multiple CSS or JavaScript files into a single file. As a result, pages load faster, reducing the time spent requesting individual files. Gulp, Grunt, and Webpack are some of the tools that can assist you in speeding up the concatenation process. They enable seamless merging of many files during development, ensuring deployment readiness.
  • Build a Vite 5 backend integration with Flask
    11 projects | dev.to | 25 Feb 2024
    Once you build a simple Vite backend integration, try not to complicate Vite's configuration unless you absolutely must. Vite has become one of the most popular bundlers in the frontend space, but it wasn't the first and it certainly won't be the last. In my 7 years of building for the web, I've used Grunt, Gulp, Webpack, esbuild, and Parcel. Snowpack and Rome came-and-went before I ever had a chance to try them. Bun is vying for the spot of The New Hotness in bundling, Rome has been forked into Biome, and Vercel is building a Rust-based Webpack alternative.
  • Top 20 Frontend Interview Questions With Answers
    7 projects | dev.to | 3 Feb 2024
    Webpack is a module bundler, the main purpose of which is to bundle JavaScript files to make them usable in a browser.
  • A step-by-step guide: How to create and publish an NPM package.
    6 projects | dev.to | 2 Feb 2024
    NPM packages include a wide range of tools such as frameworks like Express or React, libraries like jQuery, and task runners such as Gulp, and Webpack.
  • 🔥 FAST & FURIOUS WEBSITE 2024 🔥Tips & Links for performance optimization
    2 projects | dev.to | 22 Jan 2024
    Another way to optimize is by reducing the size of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files by removing comments, unnecessary spaces, and line breaks. Combine CSS and JavaScript files into a single file to reduce the number of server requests. This can be done using build tools like Webpack or Gulp.

parcel

Posts with mentions or reviews of parcel. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-03.
  • JS Toolbox 2024: Bundlers and Test Frameworks
    10 projects | dev.to | 3 Mar 2024
    Parcel 2 emphasizes a zero-configuration approach to bundling web applications. It's a powerful tool that offers a hassle-free developer experience, focusing on simplicity and speed.
  • Build a Vite 5 backend integration with Flask
    11 projects | dev.to | 25 Feb 2024
    Once you build a simple Vite backend integration, try not to complicate Vite's configuration unless you absolutely must. Vite has become one of the most popular bundlers in the frontend space, but it wasn't the first and it certainly won't be the last. In my 7 years of building for the web, I've used Grunt, Gulp, Webpack, esbuild, and Parcel. Snowpack and Rome came-and-went before I ever had a chance to try them. Bun is vying for the spot of The New Hotness in bundling, Rome has been forked into Biome, and Vercel is building a Rust-based Webpack alternative.
  • What is JSDoc and why you may not need typescript for your next project?
    8 projects | dev.to | 22 Jan 2024
    Parcel
  • Building Node.js applications without dependencies
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Dec 2023
    I’ve tried something similar on the frontend side: I decided to build a UI for Ollama.ai using only HTML, CSS, and JS (Single-Page Application). The goal is to learn something new and have zero runtime dependencies on other projects and NPM modules. Only Node and Parcel.js (https://parceljs.org/) are needed during development for serving files, bundling, etc. The only runtime dependency is a modern browser.

    Here's what I have found so far:

    - JavaScript (vanilla) is a viable alternative to React.js

  • 11 Ways to Optimize Your Website
    12 projects | dev.to | 12 Nov 2023
    Besides Webpack, there are many other popular web bundlers available, such as Parcel, Esbuild, Rollup, and more. They all have their own unique features and strengths, and you should make your decision based on the needs and requirements of your specific project. Please refer to their official websites for details.
  • Bun vs Node.js: Everything you need to know
    7 projects | dev.to | 21 Sep 2023
    In the Node.js ecosystem, bundling is typically handled by third-party tools rather than Node.js itself. Some of the most popular bundlers in the Node.js world include Webpack, Rollup, and Parcel, offering features like code splitting, tree shaking, and hot module replacement.
  • JavaScript Gom Jabbar
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jul 2023
    There are projects attempting to do more things. I've really enjoyed Parcel (https://parceljs.org). But it won't handle things like linting or unit testing, which you may or may not want. Vite is also pretty popular (https://vitejs.dev/), and it has a test runner.

    Thing is, most of the problems described in the post aren't related to low-JS front-end libraries like HTMX or alpine. You can write React without a linter, bundler, build tool, unit testing, or linting. But with any of these projects at scale, you start wanting more:

    - If you want to write unit tests in JS, you need to choose a test runner (probably Jest or Vitest -- until the built-in node testing module becomes more common).

    - If you want linting, you need a linter (probably Eslint). If you want type safety, you need a type checker (probably Typescript).

    - If you want to create smaller JS files to ship to production and to automatically handle assets, you need a bundler.

    - If you want to use new language features while supporting old browsers, you need polyfills.

    - If you want to use all these things together, you need something to bring it together (like Webpack).

    So it really depends what you need! You may not need any. But as you can imagine, in many professional projects with multiple developers it's very nice to have unit tests, linting, and type checking :) (And you start caring about end-user performance a lot more, in which case optimizing the shipped bundle is important.)

    Take all that, and then compare to a language like Rust, which has most of the "ecosystem stuff" built-in. In Rust, you get the test runner, the linter, dependency manager, type checker, and documentation tool all included. Easy! Thankfully, Rust doesn't have to care about whether users support modern language features (because it compiles down to lower code ahead of time), or whether the binary shipped to the client is optimally organized for downloading immediately over the internet.

    It's a problem in JS because A) you have to care about more problems than many other languages since JS needs to load instantly over the wire in a web browser, and B) there is a huge amount of choice and not a lot of standardization in web tools. (And what standardization there is (Node, npm), there are still competitors trying to even further reduce the pain points.)

    I think that in ten more years, we'll be in a better place, because there is push back (like this post!) against these problems, which will encourage more tools trying to solve the explosion of tools. Which seems counterintuitive, but these tools were created to solve very real problems. So I see it as a pendulum which has swung too far, but will likely swing back to a more balanced place. And you see that with tools like Vite gaining popularity.

  • How To Secure Your JavaScript Applications
    11 projects | dev.to | 14 Jun 2023
    Bundling: Webpack, Parcel, Rollup
  • 5 Different Tools to Bundle Node.js Apps
    8 projects | dev.to | 13 Jun 2023
    Parcel is another popular bundler you can use to bundle Node.js applications. Unlike Webpack, you do not need to write additional configurations with Parcel since it is a zero-configuration bundler. It is capable of automatically detecting and bundling project dependencies.
  • [AskJS] Seeking a Shortcut or Program to Toggle 'Active State' Between Two Monitors on a Mac Mini
    3 projects | /r/javascript | 23 May 2023
    Parcel

What are some alternatives?

When comparing webpack and parcel you can also consider the following projects:

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

craco - Create React App Configuration Override, an easy and comprehensible configuration layer for Create React App.

esbuild - An extremely fast bundler for the web

gulp - A toolkit to automate & enhance your workflow

Next.js - The React Framework

Rollup - Next-generation ES module bundler

react-app-rewired - Override create-react-app webpack configs without ejecting

Snowpack - ESM-powered frontend build tool. Instant, lightweight, unbundled development. ✌️ [Moved to: https://github.com/FredKSchott/snowpack]