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Grunt vs Yarn: What are the differences?

Developers describe Grunt as " The JavaScript Task Runner ". The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort. On the other hand, Yarn is detailed as " A new package manager for JavaScript ". Yarn caches every package it downloads so it never needs to again. It also parallelizes operations to maximize resource utilization so install times are faster than ever.

Grunt can be classified as a tool in the "JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners" category, while Yarn is grouped under "Front End Package Manager" .

"Configuration " is the primary reason why developers consider Grunt over the competitors, whereas "Incredibly fast" was stated as the key factor in picking Yarn.

Grunt and Yarn are both open source tools. Yarn with 36.1K GitHub stars and 2.21K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Grunt with 11.9K GitHub stars and 1.55K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Grunt has a broader approval, being mentioned in 794 company stacks & 421 developers stacks; compared to Yarn, which is listed in 609 company stacks and 507 developer stacks.

Advice on Grunt and Yarn
Needs advice
on
npm npm
and
Yarn Yarn

From a StackShare Community member: “I’m a freelance web developer (I mostly use Node.js ) and for future projects I’m debating between npm or Yarn as my default package manager. I’m a minimalist so I hate installing software if I don’t need to- in this case that would be Yarn. For those who made the switch from npm to Yarn, what benefits have you noticed? For those who stuck with npm, are you happy you with it?"

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Replies (14)
Julian Sanchez
Lead Developer at Chore Champion · | 11 upvotes · 201.3K views

We use Yarn because it allows us to more simply manage our node_modules. It also simplifies commands and increases speed when installing modules. Our teams module download time was cut in half after switching from NPM to Yarn. We now require all employees to use Yarn (to prevent errors with package-lock.json and yarn.lock).

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Recommends
on
npm npm

I use npm since new version is pretty fast as well (Yarn may be still faster a bit but the difference isn't huge). No need for other dependency and mainly Yarn sometimes do not work. Sometimes when I want to install project dependencies I got error using Yarn but with npm everything is installed correctly.

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Mark Nelissen
Recommends
on
npm npm npm npm

I use npm because I also mainly use React and TypeScript . Since several typings (from DefinitelyTyped) depend on the React typings, Yarn tends to mess up which leads to duplicate libraries present (different versions of the same type definition), which hinders the Typescript compiler. Npm always resolves to a single version per transitive dependency. At least that's my experience with both.

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Recommends
on
Yarn Yarn

p.s.

I am not sure about the performance of the latest version of npm, whether it is different from my understanding of it below. Because I use npm very rarely when I had the following knowledge.

------⏬

I use Yarn because, first, yarn is the first tool to lock the version. Second, although npm also supports the lock version, when you use npm to lock the version, and then use package-lock.json on other systems, package-lock.json Will be modified. You understand what I mean, when you deploy projects based on Git...

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Recommends
on
Yarn Yarn

As far as I know Yarn is a super module of NPM. But it still needs npm to run.

Yarn was developed by Facebook's guys to fix some npm issues and performance.

If you use the last version of npm most of this problem does not exist anymore.

You can choose the option which makes you more confortable. I like using yarn because I'm used to it.

In the end the packages will be the same. Just try both and choose the one you feel more confortable. :)

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Shuuji TAKAHASHI
Recommends
on
Yarn Yarn

I use Yarn because it outputs nice progress messages with cute emoji and installs packages quickly if the package is cached. Also, Yarn creates yarn.lock file which makes the developer use the consistent environment.

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Recommends
on
Yarn Yarn

I am a minimalist too. I once had issues with installing Nuxt.js using NPM so I had to install Yarn but I also found that the Dev experience was much better

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Tor Hagemann
Principal Software Engineer at Socotra · | 3 upvotes · 87.8K views
Recommends
on
npm npm Yarn Yarn

You should use whichever had the best DX (developer experience) for your team. If you are doing a massive front-end project, consider yarn if not only because it makes it a snap to go from zero to ready. What some people say about npm being more stable or easier for smaller projects is highly true as well. (not to mention, you sometimes have to install yarn) But, note that official NodeJS Docker images ship with both npm and yarn. If you want to use yarn, put package-lock=false and optionally save-exact=true in your project's .npmrc file. Compare whether you prefer the ergonomics of yarn global add over npm install -g or see fewer meaningless warnings for the specific set of dependencies you leverage.

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Francois Leurent
Recommends
on
npm npm
at

We tend to stick to npm, yarn is only a fancy alternative, not 10x better. Using a self -hosted private repository (via sinopia/npm-mirror) make package locking (mostly) pointless.

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tataata
Frontend designer and developer · | 3 upvotes · 187.5K views
Recommends
on
Yarn Yarn

Yarn made it painless for the team to sync on versions of packages that we use on the project <3

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Denys Slipetskyy
Recommends
on
Yarn Yarn
at

I use Yarn because it process my dependencies way faster, predictable deps resolution order, upgrade-interactive is very handy + some Yarn specific features (workspaces, Plug’n’Play alternative installation strategy) ...

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Digital All
Recommends
on
npm npm

I use npm because its packaged with node installation and handles npm tokens in CI/CD tools for private packages/libraries.

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Recommends
on
npm npm

I use npm because its the official package manager for Node. It's reliability, security and speed has increased over time so the battle is over!

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Izzur Zuhri
Recommends
on
npm npm

I use npm because it has a lot of community support and the performance difference with alternative tool is not so significant for me.

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Decisions about Grunt and Yarn
Oleksandr Fedotov
Senior Software Engineer at joyn · | 3 upvotes · 221K views

As we have to build the application for many different TV platforms we want to split the application logic from the device/platform specific code. Previously we had different repositories and it was very hard to keep the development process when changes were done in multiple repositories, as we had to synchronize code reviews as well as merging and then updating the dependencies of projects. This issues would be even more critical when building the project from scratch what we did at Joyn. Therefor to keep all code in one place, at the same time keeping in separated in different modules we decided to give a try to monorepo. First we tried out lerna which was fine at the beginning, but later along the way we had issues with adding new dependencies which came out of the blue and were not easy to fix. Next round of evolution was yarn workspaces , we are still using it and are pretty happy with dev experience it provides. And one more advantage we got when switched to yarn workspaces that we also switched from npm to yarn what improved the state of the lock file a lot, because with npm package-lock file was updated every time you run npm install , frequent updates of package-lock file were causing very often merge conflicts. So right now we not just having faster dependencies installation time but also no conflicts coming from lock file.

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Petr Bambušek
Head of Frontend at Mews · | 2 upvotes · 231.8K views

This was no real choice - we switched the moment Yarn was available, and never looked back. Yarn is the only reasonable frontend package manager that's actually being developed. They even aim to heal the node_modules madness with v2! Npm is just copying its ideas on top of introducing massive bugs with every change.

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Pros of Grunt
Pros of Yarn
  • 288
    Configuration
  • 176
    Open source
  • 166
    Automation of minification and live reload
  • 60
    Great community
  • 7
    SASS compilation
  • 84
    Incredibly fast
  • 21
    Easy to use
  • 12
    Open Source
  • 10
    Can install any npm package
  • 7
    Works where npm fails
  • 6
    Workspaces
  • 2
    Incomplete to run tasks
  • 1
    Fast

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Cons of Grunt
Cons of Yarn
  • 1
    Poor mindshare/community support
  • 15
    Facebook
  • 6
    Sends data to facebook
  • 3
    Should be installed separately
  • 2
    Cannot publish to registry other than npm

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What is Grunt?

The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort.

What is Yarn?

Yarn caches every package it downloads so it never needs to again. It also parallelizes operations to maximize resource utilization so install times are faster than ever.

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What companies use Grunt?
What companies use Yarn?
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What tools integrate with Grunt?
What tools integrate with Yarn?

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What are some alternatives to Grunt and Yarn?
gulp
Build system automating tasks: minification and copying of all JavaScript files, static images. More capable of watching files to automatically rerun the task when a file changes.
Webpack
A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.
npm
npm is the command-line interface to the npm ecosystem. It is battle-tested, surprisingly flexible, and used by hundreds of thousands of JavaScript developers every day.
Gradle
Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.
Apache Maven
Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.
See all alternatives