When comparing NPM vs JSPM, the Slant community recommends NPM for most people. In the question“What are the best front-end package managers?” NPM is ranked 2nd while JSPM is ranked 3rd. 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 Registry agnostic
JSPM is registry agnostic, it can pull packages from npm and github and is built in such a way it can support more.
Pro Module style agnostic
Loads ES6, AMD, CommonJS and globals.
Pro Can transcompile ES6, JSX and Typescript
Pro Much faster than Webpack or Browserify
While Webpack and Browserify recompile the source code using Babel, jspm is the only packager that can load prebuild/minified code downloaded from the npm registry.
Pro Bundled based on imported modules without any config
Create the bundle file without config and add only the modules imported.
Pro Switch between async or sync load
With a simple command you could change between load the modules async by systemjs or sync with a bundle file.
Pro Easy install packages from npm, github or any git repository
Pro Versioned package urls
It creates a packages folders which are versioned. This makes it future proof for a time where we stop bundling all the code. In the following presentation Guy Bedford calls bundling an anti-pattern.
Pro Very easy to start with
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 You need to be an expert to write shims
You can load any module. But that comes with the price:
you need to find or write configs to load a particular rare module.
Con Doesn't hide complexity
JSPM doesn't try to hide complexity from the user. I.e. when some issue emerges you need understand a lot to be able to patch it or create a workaround.
Con Watcher has bugs
Watching would benefit from improvements
Con Unstable API
0.17 is still in beta. 0.16 is lacking features.
Con Poor bundler performance
Bundling performance is slow, though offset by the fact that bundling is not required during development, since it can load dependencies asynchronously.