When comparing Volo vs JSPM, the Slant community recommends JSPM for most people. In the question“What are the best front-end package managers?” JSPM is ranked 3rd while Volo is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose JSPM is:
JSPM is registry agnostic, it can pull packages from npm and github and is built in such a way it can support more.
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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 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 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 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.