When comparing Grunt vs Bower, the Slant community recommends Bower for most people. In the question“What are the best tools for front-end JavaScript development?” Bower is ranked 8th while Grunt is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Bower is:
Bower is flexible enough that you can manage pretty much any package you would need on the front-end, so you can manage all your dependencies with one tool, including CSS, boilerplate, fonts and more.
Specs
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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 Manages non-JavaScript components
Bower is flexible enough that you can manage pretty much any package you would need on the front-end, so you can manage all your dependencies with one tool, including CSS, boilerplate, fonts and more.
Pro Simplicity provides more flexibility
Bower doesn't try to handle too much of the workflow process, which means it's more flexible, and can be incorporated into more workflows. It tries to just do package management well and nothing else, which is why so many workflow wrappers support it. Because it doesn't try to do too much vertical integration, it also means that the list of supported components that it manages is huge.
Pro Largest front-end specific package registry
Although npm is the largest javascript package manager, Bower is the most popular one built specifically for the front-end. With over 16000 components in its registry, pretty much every component you can think of is supported.
Pro Easily integrates with other tools
Because of Bower's focus on simplicity, it makes it much easier to integrate with other tools, so it has a wide range of support with workflow wrappers and task managers such as yeoman and grunt.
Pro Requires a flat dependency tree
While nested dependencies are better for backend modules that need lots of inter-dependency, they lead to bloated file sizes. Flat dependencies are better for frontend optimization, where file size needs to be more closely managed.
Pro Does not store components in a registry
You always get package directly from owner's repository, i.e. you will always get latest version as soon as its version tag is committed without need of waiting until owner publishes updated package.
Pro Simpler to manage varied code
Because Bower makes few assumptions about the source and format of packages, it's easier to apply it to more of your packages
Pro AMD & CJS compatible
Bower strives to be as simple of a package manager as possible and puts as few restrictions on the packages in the registry as possible, making it the most flexible package manager with the most potential packages.
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 Seems like a redundant package manger
NPM with Webpack/Browserify can handle all the dependencies for both back-end and front-end. The only place where Bower may be useful is for projects which use libraries not supported by NPM, such as Polymer.
Con Deprecated
As of May 2017 Bower has been deprecated and will not receive any updates with new features. Bugs will still be fixed though for existing projects that use Bower.
Con Does not store components in a registry
Bower installs components directly from urls and repositories, which makes it more susceptible to components being taken down, with fewer guarantees about their availability.
Con Difficult to create bundles
To create a minified bundle of all the required JS dependencies other tools need to be used.
For example a JavaScript task runner which will automatically concatenate JavaScript files and minify them will be needed. Although it's done automatically, it's still extra work because the task runner needs to be configured.
Con Lack of signing of packages on the repository
Anyone can register their package on Bower's GIT registry - on one side, this brings a lot of ease to developers, but on the other hand, this can lead to security issues because the packages are not signed.
Con Less packages than npm due to a smaller ecosystem
- Bower: 36,000 packages
- Npm: 161,876 total packages (of course, many work only on the server)