Grunt vs Gulp

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.

Currently gulp offers a selection of 1000+ plugins and it is growing rapidly.

This depends on your style, but gulp is closer to the code, the actual execution isn't hidden by multiple layers and it's much easier to customize the build system without writing bloated modules. This also brings rather small configuration files.

Any task can be set to have other tasks as dependencies. The dependencies are specified through piping streams, and tasks run concurrently if they do not block in dependencies.

Since Gulp just uses streams at its core, you don't actually need a plugin wrapper to use a project that uses streams. If you use this approach, the you don't even have to worry about plugin maintenance at all, and get the bleeding edge updates as soon as they come out even if the plugin hasn't been updated. It also means if a project happens to not have a plugin, you don't need to write a new one, you can just use it as is.

In gulp, it's easy to pipe multiple steps together which you commonly need with build systems. For example, you may need to compile the javascript source files, then package them together, and then minify it. The streaming system makes this much easier.

Additionally, it improves performance since all operations are done in memory (compared to I/O operations) and avoids the need of unnecessarily compiling files (compared to Grunt that has to compile all files even if just one has changed).

In Gulp, the transforms are performed through chains which makes it easier to understand the order of operations, and easier to modify it.

Because streams in Gulp use pipes to establish dependency order, they are parallel by default without having to rely on plugins or hacks.

Because Gulp is built using streams, it can store intermediate transformations in memory and defer writing to disk until the very end. This improves performance by not requiring expensive blocking disk operations for task dependencies.

Gulp's configuration file is actually very readable because it's actual JavaScript instead of a large file of JSON objects. The entry barrier is very low for developers who have never used a task runner before and it's API is very simple, with only 4 methods.

Because Gulp is built on top of the streaming API, you don't actually need gulp to use them. This could be helpful if you want to re-use those modules outside of gulp, possibly for testing, and using the same modules would be more consistent.