When comparing Volo vs Webpack, the Slant community recommends Webpack for most people. In the question“What are the best open source front-end package managers?” Webpack is ranked 2nd while Volo is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Webpack is:
Plugins and loaders are easy to write and allow you to control each step of the build, from loading and compiling CoffeeScript, LESS and JADE files to smart post processing and asset manifest building.
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Pros
Pro Automatically converts files to AMD for you
Volo is based around AMD, which is great for asynchronous loading, and if you try to add a non-AMD package, it will interactively ask you for its dependencies and exports.
Pro Provides command endpoints for task management
Volo also allows you to provide a volofile that lets you run various tasks. Volo provides a helper object for running cross platform command line commands, and also allows you to use binaries in node_modules
or create your own.
Pro Quickly bootstrap your project with templates
Volo has a create
command that can copy template projects from GitHub, so you can get set up quickly.
Pro Allows for extensible commands
Sometimes you might require some additional commands, other than the ones Volo provides; Volo has you covered in these cases as well. The package manager is extremely extensible at its core, and can be easily modified and extended.
Pro Loads packages directly from Github
If any project exists on Github, that means you can use it along with Volo in your frontend projects.
Pro Rich and flexible plugin infrastructure
Plugins and loaders are easy to write and allow you to control each step of the build, from loading and compiling CoffeeScript, LESS and JADE files to smart post processing and asset manifest building.
Pro Tap into npm's huge module ecosystem
Using Webpack opens you up to npm, that has over 80k modules of which a great amount work both client-side and server-side. And the list is growing rapidly.
Pro Can create a single bundle or multiple chunks loaded on demand, to reduce initial loading time
Webpack allows you to split your codebase into multiple chunks. Chunks are loaded on demand. This reduces the initial loading time.
Pro Supports source maps for easier debugging
Source maps allow for easier debugging, because they allow you to find the problems within the origin files instead of the output file.
Pro ES6 module support
Webpack supports ES6 modules and their import
and export
methods without having to compile them to CommonJS require
Pro Share the same modules client-side and server-side
Because Webpack allows you to use the same require() function as node.js, you can easily share modules between the client-side and server-side.
Pro Bundles CommonJs and AMD modules (even combined)
Webpack supports AMD and CommonJS module styles. It performs clever static analysis on the AST of your code. It even has an evaluation engine to evaluate simple expressions. This allows you to support most existing libraries.
Pro Mix ES6 AMD and CommonJS
Webpack supports using all three module types, even in the same file.
Pro Limit plugin integration issues
Cons
Con Does not store components in a registry
Volo installs components directly from urls and repositories, which makes it more susceptible to components being taken down, with fewer guarantees about their availability.
Con Config file may be hard to understand
Due to a somewhat hard to grasp syntax, configuring Webpack may take some time.