When comparing Browserify vs Angular, the Slant community recommends Browserify for most people. In the question“What are the best frontend JavaScript module bundlers?” Browserify is ranked 4th while Angular is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Browserify is:
Using browserify opens you up to npm, that has over 80k modules of which a great amount work both client-side and server-side. And the list is growing rapidly.
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Pros
Pro Tap into npm's huge module ecosystem
Using browserify opens you up to npm, that has over 80k modules of which a great amount work both client-side and server-side. And the list is growing rapidly.
Pro Simple to use dependency management
To require a file, just use the require() function.
var foo = require('./foo.js');
These files may have dependencies of their own. Browserify will build a dependency graph and bundle it into a single file that you just have to put in a script tag.
<html>
<body>
<script src="bundle.js"></script>
</body>
</html>
Pro Share the same modules client-side and server-side
Because browserify allows you to use the same require() function as node.js, you can easily share modules between the client-side and server-side.
Pro Provides browser-friendly shims of Node modules
Browserify provides browser-friendly shims of Node modules, that allow for things like Node event systems, path parsing, URL parsing.
Pro deAMDify & debowerify allow using modules written for other systems
Browserify includes transforms such as deAMDify, that allow you to use modules written in the AMD module format, and debowerify, that allows you to use modules intended to be managed by Bower package manager.
Pro CJS module format
Pro Friendly plugin interface
Writing plugins is relatively easy and straight forward as each file, you can run a function that gives a file name and path, based on that you can decide if you want to do something like parse, transform, modify etc the file or skip it.
Pro Great tooling and language support
Very good CLI and webpack, bundling, testing, deployment support. Deep TypeScript integration and support.
Cons
Con Requires NodeJS environment just to get in the door
Browserify does nothing client-side. It's only a server-side builder. If you want to load files from other domains, look at RequireJS. If you want to break your code up into multiple modules, look at RequireJS or Webpack.
Con Requires a lot of magic for setup
Digging for high amount of modules
Con Slightly over-engineered
Very enterprisey - made for huge architectures and with tons of declarative, non-intuitive annotations it makes it overkill for very small projects.
Con Native i18n support over-engineered
Not developer-friendly. Switching languages need reloading the whole page. There are third party solutions that work better.