Yeoman vs Lineman

Yeoman has an active community with new generators being created at a rapid pace. Because of the momentum behind the community, you can expect good support and adoption for new tools and frameworks promptly after they come out.

Yeoman generators allow you to quickly set up a new project. Invoked with the scaffolding tool 'yo' they provide a boilerplate & tooling selection. There are over 1000 generators, including generators for ember, angular & backbone, to choose from, the majority of which are community maintained.

Yeoman supports both major build systems - Grunt and Gulp. These build systems will help you automate tasks such as minification & concatenation of files, running tests, deploying and live-updating your webpage among many others.

Yeoman is free, open source and licensed under BSD.

Yeoman supports both Bower and npm, and is flexible in regard to tools to allow it to work with a wider range of project requirements.

Yeoman wants webapp development to be more standardized under the "Yeoman workflow" banner. As such it encourages the use of a specific combination of tools - a scaffolding tool (yo), a build tool (grunt, gulp, etc) and a package manager (bower, npm).

Yeoman's scaffolding system allows generators to rely on other generators allowing for better code reuse and standardization between generators that use a common sub-component.

As a command line tool it works on OS X, Linux & Windows.

Yeoman doesn't just scaffold your project, but also helps you integrate with your package manager directly, so you can manage your entire project with it.

Developers can also create their own Yeoman generator which are practically plugins with which Yeoman works. Generators are basically Node.js modules and can be created just like any other Node module.

There is also a very detailed and useful guide on how to create a generator on the Yeoman official website.

Lineman integrates a powerful test runner - Test'em. By default it will test against PhantomJS and output in TAP13 format.

While Lineman is hands off when it comes to what you do on the client side, the workflow and tools used around it are opinionated, which means there's less to set up, the tools picked are fine tuned to work together, and you can get up and running faster without having to decide between dozens of tools. While it means less flexibility with the tools you use, it also means that advanced features are built in and available from the start, and you can focus on building the client side, without worrying about the tools around it.

Although Lineman is fully configurable, it comes with well tuned defaults and a built in scaffold so you can get up and running with advanced features quickly with things like continuous integration and live reloading with less or no configuration.

Lineman prides itself on avoiding assumptions on how things should be done and allows for greater freedom in tool choice. It generates a skeletal app, with no example code. Yet if you choose, you can get templates for Backbone, Ember, Angular and other frameworks.

Lineman is designed against code generation, which is a good thing as generated code requires more maintenance to keep library code in sync with the generated code, and is dangerous to use if you don't fully understand what the generated code is doing.

While the tools Lineman uses are opinionated, the build process is not as it uses Grunt, so you can get the benefits of a well tuned workflow while still being able to use whatever compiled languages and build process you want. Also, since Lineman handles the tasks outside of compilation and file transformation for you, you can keep your gruntfile simpler and easier to maintain as it would be dedicated to just the build system, and not other task management.

Licensed under MIT.