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Add to SafariWhen comparing Brunch vs Broccoli, the Slant community recommends Brunch for most people. In the question“What are the best Node.js build systems / task runners?” Brunch is ranked 5th while Broccoli is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Brunch is:
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.
Specs
Question Ranking
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 Brocfile fairly straightforward and small
Pro Rebuilds are really fast
In larger apps rebuilds get slower and slower as the size of the application increases. Broccoli deals with this by building only the files that were changed and intelligently figuring out their dependencies. This leads to rebuilds being of O(1) constant-time (in Software Engineering terms).
Pro Chainable plugins
With broccoli developers can chain plugins.
var tree = broccoli.makeTree('lib')
tree = compileCoffeeScript(tree)
tree = uglifyJS(tree)
return treeCons
Con Windows not fully supported
Con Assumptions about your project limit what you can do
Assumes you want to always output to single output directory. This directory must not exist at the time of running. It also (therefore) can't be your current directory. This puts broccoli slightly out of the class of a truly general "task runner".
Con Small community
Broccoli's community is still relatively small and not very active, at least compared to it's competitors. This leads to fewer plugins, guides and less support from developers for any problem that you may face using Broccoli.
