When comparing Brunch vs rollup, the Slant community recommends rollup for most people. In the question“What are the best frontend JavaScript module bundlers?” rollup is ranked 5th while Brunch is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose rollup is:
Can reduce resulting bundle size by performing "tree-shaking" (removing unused parts of code).
Specs
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Pros
Pro Compilation is super fast
According to speed benchmarks, Brunch is one of the fastest tools around for compiling files. According to the authors of Brunch the reason behind this speed is that it recompiles only the changes that were made to an app and performs extensive caching of the app's code.
Pro Time to setup is extremely low
After installing Brunch the next step is to load a skeleton from git.io/skeletons. This step is as easy as installing another plugin from the npm registry, just point Brunch to the path of the required skeleton/generator then wait for it to work out its magic. Next, run brunch build
then wait for a second or two and voila! the project is ready.
Pro The configuration file is small and the configuration itself is fast and easy
Brunch's config files can be extremely small compared to other alternatives. The fact that brunch also allows you to chose from a number of generators also lowers the configuration time considerably.
Pro Concatenates scripts and styles and auto-generates matching source maps
Brunch automatically produces a source map for all javascript files and CSS stylesheets whenever it minifies an app's resources. This little feature is extremely helpful when debugging is required at the client end.
Pro Implements tree-shaking
Can reduce resulting bundle size by performing "tree-shaking" (removing unused parts of code).
Pro Easy configuration
Simple config files
Pro Small and fast installation
It's only one file.
Pro Ideal for shipping es2015/ES6 modules
Cons
Con Async/await support lack
Doesn't support async/await out of the box for the time being, and there is no available working plugin to fill the gap.