npm vs pip

Overview

npm

Stacks137.4K

Followers82.2K

Votes1.6K

GitHub Stars17.6K

Forks3.0K

pip

Stacks799

Followers182

Votes3

npm vs pip: What are the differences?

npm and pip are package managers used for downloading and managing software packages in different programming languages. While both serve a similar purpose, there are key differences between npm and pip.

Language Compatibility: npm is used primarily for managing packages in JavaScript, whereas pip is used for managing packages in Python.
Package Repositories: npm uses the npm registry as its default package repository, which contains a vast number of JavaScript packages. On the other hand, pip uses the Python Package Index (PyPI) as its default package repository, providing access to a wide range of Python packages.
Package Installation: npm installs packages locally within a specific project directory, maintaining a separate version of each package for each project. In contrast, pip by default installs packages system-wide, making them accessible to all Python projects.
Package Management Commands: npm provides a variety of package management commands, such as install, uninstall, update, and list, to manage packages. In comparison, pip includes similar package management commands, including install, uninstall, freeze, and list, but also incorporates additional commands specific to Python package management.
Dependency Management: npm includes a powerful dependency management system that allows you to specify dependencies and their versions in a package.json file. It automatically resolves and installs all dependencies required by a package. Pip also supports dependency management through the use of a requirements.txt file, but it does not handle dependency conflicts as seamlessly as npm.
Community Support: npm has a thriving open-source community and is widely used in the JavaScript ecosystem. It offers a wide range of community-maintained packages and has excellent community support. Pip also has a strong community backing, with a vast collection of Python packages available, but may not have the same level of community involvement as npm.

In summary, npm and pip are package managers that differ in terms of language compatibility, package repositories, installation, package management commands, dependency management, and community support. They are designed to serve the specific package management needs of JavaScript and Python respectively.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on npm, pip

StackShare

Apr 23, 2019

Needs adviceon

Node.js

npm

Yarn

From a StackShare Community member: “I’m a freelance web developer (I mostly use Node.js) and for future projects I’m debating between npm or Yarn as my default package manager. I’m a minimalist so I hate installing software if I don’t need to- in this case that would be Yarn. For those who made the switch from npm to Yarn, what benefits have you noticed? For those who stuck with npm, are you happy you with it?"

294k views294k

Comments

Mark

CTO at Gemsotec bvba

Apr 25, 2019

Reviewon

React

TypeScript

Yarn

I use npm because I also mainly use React and TypeScript. Since several typings (from DefinitelyTyped) depend on the React typings, Yarn tends to mess up which leads to duplicate libraries present (different versions of the same type definition), which hinders the Typescript compiler. Npm always resolves to a single version per transitive dependency. At least that's my experience with both.

251k views251k

Comments

Oleksandr

Senior Software Engineer at joyn

Dec 7, 2019

Decided

As we have to build the application for many different TV platforms we want to split the application logic from the device/platform specific code. Previously we had different repositories and it was very hard to keep the development process when changes were done in multiple repositories, as we had to synchronize code reviews as well as merging and then updating the dependencies of projects. This issues would be even more critical when building the project from scratch what we did at Joyn. Therefor to keep all code in one place, at the same time keeping in separated in different modules we decided to give a try to monorepo. First we tried out lerna which was fine at the beginning, but later along the way we had issues with adding new dependencies which came out of the blue and were not easy to fix. Next round of evolution was yarn workspaces, we are still using it and are pretty happy with dev experience it provides. And one more advantage we got when switched to yarn workspaces that we also switched from npm to yarn what improved the state of the lock file a lot, because with npm package-lock file was updated every time you run npm install, frequent updates of package-lock file were causing very often merge conflicts. So right now we not just having faster dependencies installation time but also no conflicts coming from lock file.

310k views310k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

npm	pip
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.	It is the package installer for Python. You can use pip to install packages from the Python Package Index and other indexes.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 17.6K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 3.0K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 137.4K	Stacks 799
Followers 82.2K	Followers 182
Votes 1.6K	Votes 3
Pros & Cons
Pros 648 Best package management system for javascript 382 Open-source 327 Great community 148 More packages than rubygems, pypi, or packagist 112 Nice people matter Cons 5 Problems with lockfiles 5 Bad at package versioning and being deterministic 3 Node-gyp takes forever 1 Super slow	Pros 3 Best package management system for python

What are some alternatives to npm, pip?

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.

Browserify

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

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.

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.

Verdaccio

A simple, zero-config-required local private npm registry. Comes out of the box with its own tiny database, and the ability to proxy other registries (eg. npmjs.org), caching the downloaded modules along the way.

Duo

Duo is a next-generation package manager that blends the best ideas from Component, Browserify and Go to make organizing and writing front-end code quick and painless.

Pika.dev

It is a new kind of package registry for the modern web. It handles formatting, configuring, building and publishing every package on the registry, so that individual authors don't have to.

Bundler

It provides a consistent environment for Ruby projects by tracking and installing the exact gems and versions that are needed. It is an exit from dependency hell, and ensures that the gems you need are present in development, staging, and production.

Browserify-CDN

Browsers don't have the require method defined, but Node.js does. With Browserify you can write code that uses require in the same way that you would use it in Node.

Entropic

It is a new package registry with a new CLI, designed to be easy to stand up inside your network. It features an entirely new file-centric API and a content-addressable storage system that attempts to minimize the amount of data you must retrieve over a network. This file-centric approach also applies to the publication API.

Related Comparisons

npm vs pip: What are the differences?

Language Compatibility: npm is used primarily for managing packages in JavaScript, whereas pip is used for managing packages in Python.
Package Repositories: npm uses the npm registry as its default package repository, which contains a vast number of JavaScript packages. On the other hand, pip uses the Python Package Index (PyPI) as its default package repository, providing access to a wide range of Python packages.
Package Installation: npm installs packages locally within a specific project directory, maintaining a separate version of each package for each project. In contrast, pip by default installs packages system-wide, making them accessible to all Python projects.
Package Management Commands: npm provides a variety of package management commands, such as install, uninstall, update, and list, to manage packages. In comparison, pip includes similar package management commands, including install, uninstall, freeze, and list, but also incorporates additional commands specific to Python package management.
Dependency Management: npm includes a powerful dependency management system that allows you to specify dependencies and their versions in a package.json file. It automatically resolves and installs all dependencies required by a package. Pip also supports dependency management through the use of a requirements.txt file, but it does not handle dependency conflicts as seamlessly as npm.
Community Support: npm has a thriving open-source community and is widely used in the JavaScript ecosystem. It offers a wide range of community-maintained packages and has excellent community support. Pip also has a strong community backing, with a vast collection of Python packages available, but may not have the same level of community involvement as npm.

npm vs pip

Overview