When comparing Yeoman vs CodeKit, the Slant community recommends Yeoman for most people. In the question“What are the best workflow wrappers for front-end development?” Yeoman is ranked 1st while CodeKit is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose Yeoman is:
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.
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Pros
Pro Active community
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.
Pro Huge number of generators for scaffolding your project
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.
Pro Allows you to choose between different build systems
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.
Pro Free and open source
Yeoman is free, open source and licensed under BSD.
Pro Support for the package manager of your choice
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.
Pro Standardized workflow process
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).
Pro Generators can be composed with other generators
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.
Pro Cross-platform
As a command line tool it works on OS X, Linux & Windows.
Pro Works with the package manager directly
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.
Pro Developers can create their own plugins
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.
Pro Everything is set up for you
Everything you need to get a project started is included with CodeKit. Thanks to the professional support, different components of the workflow pipeline are guaranteed to play nicely with each other without you needing to do the research on how to configure them.
More advanced features that may require extra configuration to set up with other workflow wrappers are set up out of the box in CodeKit, like automatic browser updating, linting, and source maps.
Pro Provides a clean and modern GUI
CodeKit has a clean and intuitive graphical user interface out of the box. Most other tools in this category run as command line utilities or require unsupported third-party plugins to run with a GUI.
The CodeKit GUI makes it easier to navigate and manage the various components of your project with helpful UIs like dropdowns, and views that provide extra details without having to run a separate command.
Pro Live browser updating built in
CodeKit has live updating built in and will update monitored files across multiple browsers and devices, and refresh CSS without a new page load. Other workflow wrappers have live updating, but they require extra configuration. With CodeKit, everything is set up for you so you can get it up and running in no time at all.
Pro Interactively define how files compile with a GUI
You can navigate your project directory, and use a menu form to set up how it gets compiled without needing to read configuration documentation, or deal with configuration errors. On top of that, file watching and recompilation is built in with no extra configuration needed.
Pro Great value for money
At a one time cost of $29, it's a great deal considering how powerful and easy to use it is.
Pro Visual package management with Bower
CodeKit provides a clean GUI for Bower that makes it easier to navigate and get information about modules without having to deal with a command line interface.
Pro Connects with MAMP
You can use it to, for example, live-update server-side PHP by establishing a connection with your local MAMP server.
Pro Don't have to worry about vendor prefixes due to Autoprefixer support
Autoprefixer automagically adds vendor prefixes based on latest information.
Pro Reduces size of compressed images
CodeKit provides a powerful tool to automatically reduce the size of compressed images and production web code.
Pro Live pre-processor and script compilation
CodeKit supports live compilation of Less, Sass, Stylus, Jade, Haml, Slim, CoffeeScript, JavaScript and Compass including automatic debugging and minification.
Pro Has over 6k componenets
Install 6,000+ Bower components with a single click: Bootstrap, jQuery, Modernizr, Zurb Foundation, even WordPress.
Cons
Con Combining Yeoman and backend frameworks can bring problems
Combining Yeoman and a backend framework such as Django, Rails or Laravel can create problem because the project structure of Yeoman may not be compatible with that of the backend project. It can be tuned to work but for small projects it can be relatively time consuming.
Con Mac only
This is a major problem for larger teams that have varied development environments.
Con Confined
You get only the tools that are provided by the application.