When comparing Gulp vs Slush, the Slant community recommends Slush for most people. In the question“What are the best workflow wrappers for front-end development?” Slush is ranked 4th while Gulp is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Slush is:
Slush scaffolds can use [Inquirer](https://www.npmjs.org/package/inquirer) to get CLI input for setting up projects.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Large plugin ecosystem
Currently gulp offers a selection of 1000+ plugins and it is growing rapidly.
Pro Focuses on code instead of configuration
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.
Pro Allows creating task dependencies
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.
Pro It is possible to use projects that use streams without plugins
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.
Pro Streaming build system makes it easier to apply code transformations
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).
Pro Chaining API that's simple and elegant
In Gulp, the transforms are performed through chains which makes it easier to understand the order of operations, and easier to modify it.
Pro Concurrency allows for high-speed perfomance
Because streams in Gulp use pipes to establish dependency order, they are parallel by default without having to rely on plugins or hacks.
Pro Minimizes disk operations for improved performance
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.
Pro The configuration file is easily readable
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.
Pro Gulp modules are usable without Gulp
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.
Pro Gulp tasks run from terminal
Pro Interactively set up projects with the Inquirer module
Slush scaffolds can use Inquirer to get CLI input for setting up projects.
Pro Built from the ground up to work with Gulp
Because Slush is built around streams and designed to work best with Gulp. It allows you to get the benefits of a streaming build system without having to manage the components yourself.
Pro Easier to maintain scaffolding through code
Because Slush is built on Gulp which puts code before configuration, scaffolding can be done in a simpler more straightforward way. Creating scaffolding through configuration requires more knowledge about the scaffold's specific implementation and remembering documentation, whereas doing it in code is more self explanatory and requires less domain knowledge to get others up to speed.
Pro Scaffolds are easier to hook up together
Because all Slush scaffolds share the commonality of streams, it's easier to combine them through that common interface. With configuration based workflow wrappers, different components may have specific implementations that can cause problems with interoperability. With streams, there's better encapsulation of functionality, making it harder to mess up a scaffold leading to better compatibility.
Pro Own 'repository' of different project templates
Slush has a well cataloged collection of scaffolds created for it by the community, providing a large collection of workflows prebuilt for almost any task you might want to perform.
You can view the list of generators here.
Cons
Con Dead
Gulp is dead, hasn't been updated in 4 years.
Con Rapidly changing API
While it's good that the gulp maintainers want the api to be as good as possible, it comes at the expense of stability. The upcoming gulp 4.0 release has another update to the way dependency management works which will require everyone to update their build scripts.
It also makes it hard to look up information on best practices as the best practices keep changing, making a lot of the blog posts and questions about gulp out of date.
Con You need to know some limitations that are not very intuitive
There are some features in Gulp which may not be very intuitive, or that otherwise should have been the default features instead of having to implement them through arguments. For example, to keep the correct folder structure when you are copying a file, you have to add {base: "lib/"}
as an argument.
Con No incremental building
Con Not suited for big and complex apps
Writing gulpfile for complex app which consists of many source types is very cumbersome and flawy process. You'll know when you want to move to webpack.
Con Still young with few generators available
Slush is still young compared to Yeoman. Although it has quite a few generators made by third parties and it's quite easy to make one yourself. It still has fewer generators than older alternatives.