CodeKit vs Slush

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.

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.

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.

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.

At a one time cost of $29, it's a great deal considering how powerful and easy to use it is.

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.

You can use it to, for example, live-update server-side PHP by establishing a connection with your local MAMP server.

Autoprefixer automagically adds vendor prefixes based on latest information.

CodeKit provides a powerful tool to automatically reduce the size of compressed images and production web code.

CodeKit supports live compilation of Less, Sass, Stylus, Jade, Haml, Slim, CoffeeScript, JavaScript and Compass including automatic debugging and minification.

Install 6,000+ Bower components with a single click: Bootstrap, jQuery, Modernizr, Zurb Foundation, even WordPress.

Slush scaffolds can use Inquirer to get CLI input for setting up projects.

Because Slush is built around streams and designed to work best with Gulp. It allows you to get the benefits of a streaming build system without having to manage the components yourself.

Because Slush is built on Gulp which puts code before configuration, scaffolding can be done in a simpler more straightforward way. Creating scaffolding through configuration requires more knowledge about the scaffold's specific implementation and remembering documentation, whereas doing it in code is more self explanatory and requires less domain knowledge to get others up to speed.

Because all Slush scaffolds share the commonality of streams, it's easier to combine them through that common interface. With configuration based workflow wrappers, different components may have specific implementations that can cause problems with interoperability. With streams, there's better encapsulation of functionality, making it harder to mess up a scaffold leading to better compatibility.

Slush has a well cataloged collection of scaffolds created for it by the community, providing a large collection of workflows prebuilt for almost any task you might want to perform.

You can view the list of generators here.