Browserify vs Brunch
When comparing Browserify vs Brunch, the Slant community recommends Browserify for most people. In the question“What are the best frontend JavaScript module bundlers?” Browserify is ranked 4th while Brunch is ranked 8th. 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.
Specs
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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 Compilation is super fast
According to speed benchmarks, Brunch is one of the fastest tools around for compiling files. According to the authors of Brunch the reason behind this speed is that it recompiles only the changes that were made to an app and performs extensive caching of the app's code.
Pro Time to setup is extremely low
After installing Brunch the next step is to load a skeleton from git.io/skeletons. This step is as easy as installing another plugin from the npm registry, just point Brunch to the path of the required skeleton/generator then wait for it to work out its magic. Next, run brunch build
then wait for a second or two and voila! the project is ready.
Pro The configuration file is small and the configuration itself is fast and easy
Brunch's config files can be extremely small compared to other alternatives. The fact that brunch also allows you to chose from a number of generators also lowers the configuration time considerably.
Pro Concatenates scripts and styles and auto-generates matching source maps
Brunch automatically produces a source map for all javascript files and CSS stylesheets whenever it minifies an app's resources. This little feature is extremely helpful when debugging is required at the client end.
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