What are the best front-end package managers?

Frontend package managers are varried between their approaches, and integral to how you set up your project. It's important that you are comfortable with their approach, as it may be hard to migrate a project off of one down the road.

You should consider where the packages come from. Some package managers have central registries of packages, in which case you should check that the registry has the packages you need. Others let you link directly from github, but those may be less dependable, and harder to manage versions. Some also let you fallback to local packages as well, or some combination of them all.

Another consideration is how the packages are called in code. The major paradigms are AMD (Asynchronous Module Definition) and CJS (Common JS). AMD's main advantage is that you can load in modules in parallel asynchronously. With CJS it's easier to create concatanated script packages, which has the benefit in cutting down the total number of requests. The way you call each API is different, so switching from one to the other requires a good deal of refactoring.