When comparing Grunt vs Yeoman, the Slant community recommends Yeoman for most people. In the question“What are the best tools for front-end JavaScript development?” Yeoman is ranked 6th while Grunt is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Yeoman is:
Yeoman has an active community with new generators being created at a rapid pace. Because of the momentum behind the community, you can expect good support and adoption for new tools and frameworks promptly after they come out.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Configurations are easy to write
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.
Pro Has tons of plugins
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.
Pro Plugins configured out of the box
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.
Pro A GUI front-end via spock
A graphical user interface for grunt is available via spock.
Pro Choice of using it as a config file or writing your own functions
You can use Grunt as a config file or JavaScript by writing your functions via Node Modules.
Pro Grunt v1.0 alpha uses Orchestrator for maximum concurrency
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.
Pro An API that makes writing and using of plugins extremely easy
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.
Pro Shell commands inside Grunt
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.
Pro Active community
Yeoman has an active community with new generators being created at a rapid pace. Because of the momentum behind the community, you can expect good support and adoption for new tools and frameworks promptly after they come out.
Pro Huge number of generators for scaffolding your project
Yeoman generators allow you to quickly set up a new project. Invoked with the scaffolding tool 'yo' they provide a boilerplate & tooling selection. There are over 1000 generators, including generators for ember, angular & backbone, to choose from, the majority of which are community maintained.
Pro Allows you to choose between different build systems
Yeoman supports both major build systems - Grunt and Gulp. These build systems will help you automate tasks such as minification & concatenation of files, running tests, deploying and live-updating your webpage among many others.
Pro Free and open source
Yeoman is free, open source and licensed under BSD.
Pro Support for the package manager of your choice
Yeoman supports both Bower and npm, and is flexible in regard to tools to allow it to work with a wider range of project requirements.
Pro Standardized workflow process
Yeoman wants webapp development to be more standardized under the "Yeoman workflow" banner. As such it encourages the use of a specific combination of tools - a scaffolding tool (yo), a build tool (grunt, gulp, etc) and a package manager (bower, npm).
Pro Generators can be composed with other generators
Yeoman's scaffolding system allows generators to rely on other generators allowing for better code reuse and standardization between generators that use a common sub-component.
Pro Cross-platform
As a command line tool it works on OS X, Linux & Windows.
Pro Works with the package manager directly
Yeoman doesn't just scaffold your project, but also helps you integrate with your package manager directly, so you can manage your entire project with it.
Pro Developers can create their own plugins
Developers can also create their own Yeoman generator which are practically plugins with which Yeoman works. Generators are basically Node.js modules and can be created just like any other Node module.
There is also a very detailed and useful guide on how to create a generator on the Yeoman official website.
Cons
Con Grunt compatibility issues
Changes in different versions in grunt are not always backwards-compatible.
Con Large bloated configuration files
To configure Grunt, developers need to basically write large files and configure JSON objects. While it's very powerful, the sheer complexity of it's configuration file may be a large obstacle for newcomers and developers that have not used any automation tools before. This may push them to search for simpler alternatives.
Con Grunt lost mindshare in general
Grunt can only do what the individual plugins allow it to do. New tools aren't always being made available for Grunt, nor are they always being updated as quickly, so you're stuck with an aging ecosystem.
Con The need to track creation/movement of files
Debugging and augmenting grunt pipelines are much harder than other build systems that clearly show the pipelines in the code.
Grunt works on files so you must track where each task puts files and try and intercept that in a task if you want to add something in the middle of a build pipeline.
Con Combining Yeoman and backend frameworks can bring problems
Combining Yeoman and a backend framework such as Django, Rails or Laravel can create problem because the project structure of Yeoman may not be compatible with that of the backend project. It can be tuned to work but for small projects it can be relatively time consuming.
