npm Alternatives logo

npm Alternatives

Explore the pros & cons of npm and its alternatives. Learn about popular competitors like Yarn, gulp, and Apache Maven
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What is npm and what are its top alternatives?

npm is the command-line interface to the npm ecosystem. It is battle-tested, surprisingly flexible, and used by hundreds of thousands of JavaScript developers every day.
npm is a tool in the Front End Package Manager category of a tech stack.
npm is an open source tool with 17.5K GitHub stars and 3K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to npm's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to npm

  • Yarn
    Yarn

    Yarn caches every package it downloads so it never needs to again. It also parallelizes operations to maximize resource utilization so install times are faster than ever. ...

  • gulp
    gulp

    Build system automating tasks: minification and copying of all JavaScript files, static images. More capable of watching files to automatically rerun the task when a file changes. ...

  • Apache Maven
    Apache Maven

    Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects. ...

  • Bower
    Bower

    Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat. ...

  • NuGet
    NuGet

    A free and open-source package manager designed for the Microsoft development platform. It is also distributed as a Visual Studio extension. ...

  • Node.js
    Node.js

    Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices. ...

  • JSPM
    JSPM

    It is a package manager for the SystemJS universal module loader, built on top of the dynamic ES6 module loader. You can load npm packages in modern browsers with the native browser ES module loader. ...

  • pip
    pip

    It is the package installer for Python. You can use pip to install packages from the Python Package Index and other indexes. ...

npm alternatives & related posts

Yarn logo

Yarn

24.4K
13.3K
151
A new package manager for JavaScript
24.4K
13.3K
+ 1
151
PROS OF YARN
  • 85
    Incredibly fast
  • 22
    Easy to use
  • 13
    Open Source
  • 11
    Can install any npm package
  • 8
    Works where npm fails
  • 7
    Workspaces
  • 3
    Incomplete to run tasks
  • 2
    Fast
CONS OF YARN
  • 16
    Facebook
  • 7
    Sends data to facebook
  • 4
    Should be installed separately
  • 3
    Cannot publish to registry other than npm

related Yarn posts

Nick Parsons
Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream · | 35 upvotes · 4.3M views

Winds 2.0 is an open source Podcast/RSS reader developed by Stream with a core goal to enable a wide range of developers to contribute.

We chose JavaScript because nearly every developer knows or can, at the very least, read JavaScript. With ES6 and Node.js v10.x.x, it’s become a very capable language. Async/Await is powerful and easy to use (Async/Await vs Promises). Babel allows us to experiment with next-generation JavaScript (features that are not in the official JavaScript spec yet). Yarn allows us to consistently install packages quickly (and is filled with tons of new tricks)

We’re using JavaScript for everything – both front and backend. Most of our team is experienced with Go and Python, so Node was not an obvious choice for this app.

Sure... there will be haters who refuse to acknowledge that there is anything remotely positive about JavaScript (there are even rants on Hacker News about Node.js); however, without writing completely in JavaScript, we would not have seen the results we did.

#FrameworksFullStack #Languages

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Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 27 upvotes · 5.1M views

Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:

  • Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
  • npm as package manager
  • NestJS as Node.js framework
  • TypeScript as programming language
  • ExpressJS as web server
  • Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
  • Postman as a tool for API development
  • TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
  • JSON Web Token for access token management

The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:

  • Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
  • Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
  • A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
  • Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.
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gulp logo

gulp

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The streaming build system
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PROS OF GULP
  • 451
    Build speed
  • 277
    Readable
  • 244
    Code-over-configuration
  • 210
    Open source
  • 175
    Node streams
  • 107
    Intuitive
  • 83
    Lots of plugins
  • 66
    Works great with browserify
  • 45
    Easy to Learn
  • 17
    Laravel-elixir
  • 4
    build workflow
  • 3
    Simple & flexible
  • 3
    Great community
  • 2
    Stylus intergration
  • 2
    Clean Code
  • 2
    jade intergration
  • 0
    Well documented
CONS OF GULP
    Be the first to leave a con

    related gulp posts

    In 2014, PagerDuty struggled with safely releasing reliable mobile applications to users due to some issues with how the code was being packaged and handled.

    PagerDuty’s mobile apps are hybrid and used Cordova to share code between platforms. Coding was straightforward but packaging was not, as a separated Gulp-based build process was also being used. The PagerDuty team took a page from Java and started creating software artifacts.

    Rather than checking in transformed code or publishing modules to NPM, the team started creating zipped-up build artifacts, which coincided perfectly with GitHub's Releases feature which arrived in 2013. So despite JavaScript lacking a standard packaged app format like a JAR, PagerDuty was still able to improve the build times and sizes of their mobile apps.

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    Omid Farhang
    Sr. Full Stack Developer · | 12 upvotes · 148.7K views

    Developing static sites like a landing page for mobile app or just a personal resume using HTML5 and Bootstrap is a lot fun when you are using build tools like gulp . I made a personal resume using above tools and published them on GitHub Pages. It was fast and easy, Thanks to GitHub for the free service. All the JavaScript codes worked perfectly after being concat and minified and uglified by gulp and running perfectly on GitHub Pages. gulp created sitemap and inserted Google Analytics code into all pages and saved about 30% of images size by compressing them during build.

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    Apache Maven logo

    Apache Maven

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    Apache build manager for Java projects.
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    PROS OF APACHE MAVEN
    • 138
      Dependency management
    • 70
      Necessary evil
    • 60
      I’d rather code my app, not my build
    • 48
      Publishing packaged artifacts
    • 43
      Convention over configuration
    • 18
      Modularisation
    • 11
      Consistency across builds
    • 6
      Prevents overengineering using scripting
    • 4
      Runs Tests
    • 4
      Lot of cool plugins
    • 3
      Extensible
    • 2
      Hard to customize
    • 2
      Runs on Linux
    • 1
      Runs on OS X
    • 1
      Slow incremental build
    • 1
      Inconsistent buillds
    • 1
      Undeterminisc
    • 1
      Good IDE tooling
    CONS OF APACHE MAVEN
    • 6
      Complex
    • 1
      Inconsistent buillds
    • 0
      Not many plugin-alternatives

    related Apache Maven posts

    Tymoteusz Paul
    Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 9.7M views

    Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

    It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

    I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

    We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

    If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

    The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

    Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

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    Ganesa Vijayakumar
    Full Stack Coder | Technical Architect · | 19 upvotes · 5.3M views

    I'm planning to create a web application and also a mobile application to provide a very good shopping experience to the end customers. Shortly, my application will be aggregate the product details from difference sources and giving a clear picture to the user that when and where to buy that product with best in Quality and cost.

    I have planned to develop this in many milestones for adding N number of features and I have picked my first part to complete the core part (aggregate the product details from different sources).

    As per my work experience and knowledge, I have chosen the followings stacks to this mission.

    UI: I would like to develop this application using React, React Router and React Native since I'm a little bit familiar on this and also most importantly these will help on developing both web and mobile apps. In addition, I'm gonna use the stacks JavaScript, jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, Bootstrap wherever required.

    Service: I have planned to use Java as the main business layer language as I have 7+ years of experience on this I believe I can do better work using Java than other languages. In addition, I'm thinking to use the stacks Node.js.

    Database and ORM: I'm gonna pick MySQL as DB and Hibernate as ORM since I have a piece of good knowledge and also work experience on this combination.

    Search Engine: I need to deal with a large amount of product data and it's in-detailed info to provide enough details to end user at the same time I need to focus on the performance area too. so I have decided to use Solr as a search engine for product search and suggestions. In addition, I'm thinking to replace Solr by Elasticsearch once explored/reviewed enough about Elasticsearch.

    Host: As of now, my plan to complete the application with decent features first and deploy it in a free hosting environment like Docker and Heroku and then once it is stable then I have planned to use the AWS products Amazon S3, EC2, Amazon RDS and Amazon Route 53. I'm not sure about Microsoft Azure that what is the specialty in it than Heroku and Amazon EC2 Container Service. Anyhow, I will do explore these once again and pick the best suite one for my requirement once I reached this level.

    Build and Repositories: I have decided to choose Apache Maven and Git as these are my favorites and also so popular on respectively build and repositories.

    Additional Utilities :) - I would like to choose Codacy for code review as their Startup plan will be very helpful to this application. I'm already experienced with Google CheckStyle and SonarQube even I'm looking something on Codacy.

    Happy Coding! Suggestions are welcome! :)

    Thanks, Ganesa

    See more
    Bower logo

    Bower

    6.4K
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    A package manager for the web
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    PROS OF BOWER
    • 483
      Package management
    • 214
      Open source
    • 142
      Simple
    • 53
      Great for for project dependencies injection
    • 27
      Web components with Meteor
    • 8
      Portable dependencies Management
    CONS OF BOWER
    • 2
      Deprecated
    • 1
      Front end only

    related Bower posts

    NuGet logo

    NuGet

    4.7K
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    0
    The package manager for .NET
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    PROS OF NUGET
    • 0
      Best package (and maybe only 1) management for .NET
    CONS OF NUGET
      Be the first to leave a con

      related NuGet posts

      Node.js logo

      Node.js

      188.2K
      159.8K
      8.5K
      A platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications
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      PROS OF NODE.JS
      • 1.4K
        Npm
      • 1.3K
        Javascript
      • 1.1K
        Great libraries
      • 1K
        High-performance
      • 805
        Open source
      • 486
        Great for apis
      • 477
        Asynchronous
      • 423
        Great community
      • 390
        Great for realtime apps
      • 296
        Great for command line utilities
      • 84
        Websockets
      • 83
        Node Modules
      • 69
        Uber Simple
      • 59
        Great modularity
      • 58
        Allows us to reuse code in the frontend
      • 42
        Easy to start
      • 35
        Great for Data Streaming
      • 32
        Realtime
      • 28
        Awesome
      • 25
        Non blocking IO
      • 18
        Can be used as a proxy
      • 17
        High performance, open source, scalable
      • 16
        Non-blocking and modular
      • 15
        Easy and Fun
      • 14
        Easy and powerful
      • 13
        Future of BackEnd
      • 13
        Same lang as AngularJS
      • 12
        Fullstack
      • 11
        Fast
      • 10
        Scalability
      • 10
        Cross platform
      • 9
        Simple
      • 8
        Mean Stack
      • 7
        Great for webapps
      • 7
        Easy concurrency
      • 6
        Typescript
      • 6
        Fast, simple code and async
      • 6
        React
      • 6
        Friendly
      • 5
        Control everything
      • 5
        Its amazingly fast and scalable
      • 5
        Easy to use and fast and goes well with JSONdb's
      • 5
        Scalable
      • 5
        Great speed
      • 5
        Fast development
      • 4
        It's fast
      • 4
        Easy to use
      • 4
        Isomorphic coolness
      • 3
        Great community
      • 3
        Not Python
      • 3
        Sooper easy for the Backend connectivity
      • 3
        TypeScript Support
      • 3
        Blazing fast
      • 3
        Performant and fast prototyping
      • 3
        Easy to learn
      • 3
        Easy
      • 3
        Scales, fast, simple, great community, npm, express
      • 3
        One language, end-to-end
      • 3
        Less boilerplate code
      • 2
        Npm i ape-updating
      • 2
        Event Driven
      • 2
        Lovely
      • 1
        Creat for apis
      • 0
        Node
      CONS OF NODE.JS
      • 46
        Bound to a single CPU
      • 45
        New framework every day
      • 40
        Lots of terrible examples on the internet
      • 33
        Asynchronous programming is the worst
      • 24
        Callback
      • 19
        Javascript
      • 11
        Dependency hell
      • 11
        Dependency based on GitHub
      • 10
        Low computational power
      • 7
        Very very Slow
      • 7
        Can block whole server easily
      • 7
        Callback functions may not fire on expected sequence
      • 4
        Breaking updates
      • 4
        Unstable
      • 3
        Unneeded over complication
      • 3
        No standard approach
      • 1
        Bad transitive dependency management
      • 1
        Can't read server session

      related Node.js posts

      Shared insights
      on
      Node.jsNode.jsGraphQLGraphQLMongoDBMongoDB

      I just finished the very first version of my new hobby project: #MovieGeeks. It is a minimalist online movie catalog for you to save the movies you want to see and for rating the movies you already saw. This is just the beginning as I am planning to add more features on the lines of sharing and discovery

      For the #BackEnd I decided to use Node.js , GraphQL and MongoDB:

      1. Node.js has a huge community so it will always be a safe choice in terms of libraries and finding solutions to problems you may have

      2. GraphQL because I needed to improve my skills with it and because I was never comfortable with the usual REST approach. I believe GraphQL is a better option as it feels more natural to write apis, it improves the development velocity, by definition it fixes the over-fetching and under-fetching problem that is so common on REST apis, and on top of that, the community is getting bigger and bigger.

      3. MongoDB was my choice for the database as I already have a lot of experience working on it and because, despite of some bad reputation it has acquired in the last months, I still believe it is a powerful database for at least a very long list of use cases such as the one I needed for my website

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      Nick Rockwell
      SVP, Engineering at Fastly · | 46 upvotes · 4.1M views

      When I joined NYT there was already broad dissatisfaction with the LAMP (Linux Apache HTTP Server MySQL PHP) Stack and the front end framework, in particular. So, I wasn't passing judgment on it. I mean, LAMP's fine, you can do good work in LAMP. It's a little dated at this point, but it's not ... I didn't want to rip it out for its own sake, but everyone else was like, "We don't like this, it's really inflexible." And I remember from being outside the company when that was called MIT FIVE when it had launched. And been observing it from the outside, and I was like, you guys took so long to do that and you did it so carefully, and yet you're not happy with your decisions. Why is that? That was more the impetus. If we're going to do this again, how are we going to do it in a way that we're gonna get a better result?

      So we're moving quickly away from LAMP, I would say. So, right now, the new front end is React based and using Apollo. And we've been in a long, protracted, gradual rollout of the core experiences.

      React is now talking to GraphQL as a primary API. There's a Node.js back end, to the front end, which is mainly for server-side rendering, as well.

      Behind there, the main repository for the GraphQL server is a big table repository, that we call Bodega because it's a convenience store. And that reads off of a Kafka pipeline.

      See more
      JSPM logo

      JSPM

      90
      18
      0
      Frictionless browser package management
      90
      18
      + 1
      0
      PROS OF JSPM
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        CONS OF JSPM
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          pip logo

          pip

          573
          180
          2
          A package installer for Python
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          + 1
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          PROS OF PIP
          • 2
            Best package management system for python
          CONS OF PIP
            Be the first to leave a con

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