Grunt vs Webpack

Grunt emphasizes configuration over code. As such grunt configurations are easy to write. Writing them does not require knowledge of streams, promises, concurrency, or asynchronous tasks to set up.

Grunt has been available for a long time and during this time it has garnered a large community of dedicated developers who have made more than 4000 grunt plugins available to be used.

The default behaviors for most plugins is normally what you want, so if you just use a plugin without configuring it, it will work for most use cases.

A graphical user interface for grunt is available via spock.

You can use Grunt as a config file or JavaScript by writing your functions via Node Modules.

Grunt version 1 alpha, aka grunt-next, the upcoming next major release of Grunt, uses Orchestrator to sequence and execute tasks and dependencies with maximum concurrency, potentially bringing it up to speed with Gulp in term of performance.

The API is built in such a way that if you write a Grunt task that is useful for someone else out there or would be useful for future projects, it can be easily made into a grunt plugin and then shared using npm.

There is a Grunt plugin called grunt-exec which allows developers to execute shell commands inside their Grunt files. This is extremely easy if a developer is developing only in Node and constantly getting out of Node environment to run something like a git command can become frustrating.

Plugins and loaders are easy to write and allow you to control each step of the build, from loading and compiling CoffeeScript, LESS and JADE files to smart post processing and asset manifest building.

Using Webpack 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.

Webpack allows you to split your codebase into multiple chunks. Chunks are loaded on demand. This reduces the initial loading time.

Source maps allow for easier debugging, because they allow you to find the problems within the origin files instead of the output file.

Webpack supports ES6 modules and their import and export methods without having to compile them to CommonJS require

Because Webpack allows you to use the same require() function as node.js, you can easily share modules between the client-side and server-side.

Webpack supports AMD and CommonJS module styles. It performs clever static analysis on the AST of your code. It even has an evaluation engine to evaluate simple expressions. This allows you to support most existing libraries.

Webpack supports using all three module types, even in the same file.