When comparing NPM vs Grunt, the Slant community recommends NPM for most people. In the question“What are the best Node.js build systems / task runners?” NPM is ranked 3rd while Grunt is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose NPM is:
NPM is compatible with any CLI the developer wants to use.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Compatible with any CLI
NPM is compatible with any CLI the developer wants to use.
Pro Plenty of helpful NPM modules/plugins
NPM has a strong community that has developed plenty of libraries and plugins that are useful to developers.
Pro Very concise configuration
NPM scripts require fewer lines of code to run a given task. This is true even when it's for running build processes. Using Unix pipes lots of tasks can be reduced to one-liners.
Pro Does not need any wrapper modules
With other task runners, you need to install wrapper modules for tools you may already have installed. When using NPM that's not necessary, to use the tools you need, just install them directly through NPM.
Pro Part of node.js distribution
Pro You're most likely using NPM already
Pro Uncomplicated package management system
When it works...
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.
Cons
Con Custom tasks require additional keyword 'run'
Only a few standard tasks support being executed without the run
keyword (e.g., npm start
vs npm run customtask
)
Con Not a build system, only a task runner
It is supposed to be used for running gulp, webpack or whatever. But it is not supposed to be used as a build system.
Con Passing parameters is awkward
In order to pass additional parameters to npm you must add them after --
(e.g., npm run build -- --custom='foo'
).
Con Badly documented
Less than bare minimum official documentation leaves users in the dark without taking often expensive external courses. Even the --help text has unpluggable gaps. One official source notes the documentation isn't adequate yet nothing has been done to fix this.
Con Lot of issues with authentication and random node problems
Unable to recover from common depencies conflicts consistantly. Error messages are not always helpful to debugging. Doesn't account well for users with different versions of node.
Con Does not run well with Windows
Since a lot of projects that use NPM as a build tool most of the time make use of Bash scripts as well. This means that open source projects that run the command npm run
may run into issues when used in a Windows environment.
Con Doesn't allow you to create build process with complicated logic on its own
In complex heterogeneous app you will quickly migrate to gulp, webpack or whatever leaving to NPM only simple task running responsibility.
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.