StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Build Automation
  4. Front End Package Manager
  5. Browserify vs Parcel

Browserify vs Parcel

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Browserify
Browserify
Stacks2.2K
Followers414
Votes261
Parcel
Parcel
Stacks874
Followers250
Votes18
GitHub Stars44.0K
Forks2.3K

Browserify vs Parcel: What are the differences?

<Browserify and Parcel are both module bundlers used in web development. Browserify is one of the early tools in this domain, while Parcel is a newer entrant known for its zero configuration approach. Here we will discuss the key differences between Browserify and Parcel in six specific points.>

  1. Configuration: Browserify requires explicit configuration settings and plugins for advanced features, whereas Parcel offers a zero-configuration setup by automatically resolving dependencies and applying necessary transformations.
  2. Bundle Size Optimization: Browserify tends to produce larger bundle sizes compared to Parcel due to its traditional bundling approach, while Parcel optimizes bundle size by tree shaking, code splitting, and other optimization techniques.
  3. Performance: Parcel is known for faster build times because of its automatic parallelization and caching mechanisms, while Browserify can be slower during the bundling process, especially for larger projects.
  4. Plugin Ecosystem: Browserify has a larger and more mature plugin ecosystem that allows developers to customize and extend its functionality, while Parcel's plugin ecosystem is still growing but offers a streamlined development experience.
  5. Hot Module Replacement (HMR): Parcel has built-in support for HMR, enabling developers to see changes in real-time without a full page reload, while Browserify requires additional configuration and setup to enable HMR functionality.
  6. Community Support: Browserify has been around longer and has a larger community, making it easier to find solutions to common issues and share knowledge, whereas Parcel, being newer, is quickly gaining popularity and community support.

In Summary, Browserify and Parcel differ in configuration requirements, bundle size optimization, performance, plugin ecosystem, HMR support, and community presence.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

Browserify
Browserify
Parcel
Parcel

Browserify lets you require('modules') in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies.

Parcel is a web application bundler, differentiated by its developer experience. It offers blazing fast performance utilizing multicore processing, and requires zero configuration.

Use a node-style require() to organize your browser code and load modules installed by npm.;browserify will recursively analyze all the require() calls in your app in order to build a bundle you can serve up to the browser in a single script tag.
Blazing fast bundle times; Bundle all your assets; Automatic transforms; Zero config code splitting; Hot module replacement; Friendly error logging
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
44.0K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
2.3K
Stacks
2.2K
Stacks
874
Followers
414
Followers
250
Votes
261
Votes
18
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 75
    Node style browser code
  • 52
    Load modules installed by npm
  • 45
    Works great with gulp.js
  • 38
    NPM modules in the brower
  • 34
    Open source
Pros
  • 10
    Zero configuration
  • 8
    Built-in dev server with livereload
Cons
  • 3
    Lack of documentation
Integrations
No integrations available
JavaScript
JavaScript

What are some alternatives to Browserify, Parcel?

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.

npm

npm

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.

Webpack

Webpack

A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.

Grunt

Grunt

The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort.

RequireJS

RequireJS

RequireJS loads plain JavaScript files as well as more defined modules. It is optimized for in-browser use, including in a Web Worker, but it can be used in other JavaScript environments, like Rhino and Node. It implements the Asynchronous Module API. Using a modular script loader like RequireJS will improve the speed and quality of your code.

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.

Brunch

Brunch

Brunch is an assembler for HTML5 applications. It's agnostic to frameworks, libraries, programming, stylesheet & templating languages and backend technology.

Component

Component

Component's philosophy is the UNIX philosophy of the web - to create a platform for small, reusable components that consist of JS, CSS, HTML, images, fonts, etc. With its well-defined specs, using Component means not worrying about most frontend problems such as package management, publishing components to a registry, or creating a custom build process for every single app.

rollup

rollup

It is a module bundler for JavaScript which compiles small pieces of code into something larger and more complex, such as a library or application. It uses the new standardized format for code modules included in the ES6 revision of JavaScript, instead of previous idiosyncratic solutions such as CommonJS and AMD.

Backpack

Backpack

Backpack is minimalistic build system for Node.js. Inspired by Facebook's create-react-app, Zeit's Next.js, and Remy's Nodemon, Backpack lets you create modern Node.js apps and services with zero configuration. Backpack handles all the file-watching, live-reloading, transpiling, and bundling, so you don't have to.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana