gulp vs Karma: What are the differences?

Developers describe gulp as "The streaming build system". 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. On the other hand, Karma is detailed as "Spectacular Test Runner for JavaScript". Karma is not a testing framework, nor an assertion library. Karma just launches a HTTP server, and generates the test runner HTML file you probably already know from your favourite testing framework. So for testing purposes you can use pretty much anything you like.

gulp can be classified as a tool in the "JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners" category, while Karma is grouped under "Browser Testing".

Some of the features offered by gulp are:

• By preferring code over configuration, gulp keeps simple things simple and makes complex tasks manageable.
• By harnessing the power of node's streams you get fast builds that don't write intermediary files to disk.
• gulp's strict plugin guidelines assure plugins stay simple and work the way you expect.

On the other hand, Karma provides the following key features:

• Test on Real Devices
• Remote Control
• Testing Framework Agnostic

"Build speed" is the top reason why over 454 developers like gulp, while over 56 developers mention "Test Runner" as the leading cause for choosing Karma.

gulp and Karma are both open source tools. gulp with 31.3K GitHub stars and 4.41K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Karma with 10.7K GitHub stars and 1.61K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, gulp has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1163 company stacks & 705 developers stacks; compared to Karma, which is listed in 119 company stacks and 57 developer stacks.