Head-to-Head: Esbuild vs Rollup Analysis

Rollup is a widely popular and established bundler with a large community and ecosystem. Esbuild, although relatively new, has gained a lot of popularity due to its incredible speed and small bundle sizes. While Rollup has been around longer and has more widespread usage, Esbuild is quickly gaining traction.

Esbuild is known for its exceptional performance and fast bundling speed. It leverages Go as its underlying implementation, making it significantly faster than Rollup. Rollup is also performant, but not at the same level as Esbuild.

Rollup has a more extensive configuration setup and offers more advanced features compared to Esbuild. Rollup plugins provide a flexible and customizable build pipeline. Esbuild, on the other hand, aims for simplicity and ease of use with a minimalistic configuration approach.

Both Esbuild and Rollup excel at tree shaking, eliminating unused code from the bundle. However, Esbuild's tree shaking capabilities are often highlighted for its efficiency and performance.

Rollup has a mature and extensive ecosystem with various plugins and integrations available. Many popular libraries and frameworks offer Rollup support out of the box. Esbuild, being relatively new, has a smaller ecosystem but is rapidly growing with support for popular tools and frameworks being actively developed.

Esbuild produces smaller bundle sizes compared to Rollup, thanks to its efficient tree shaking and minification. This can be a significant advantage in performance-critical applications.

Rollup has been in development for a longer time and has a stable and proven track record. Esbuild, although newer, has gained a reputation for being stable and reliable despite its rapid development. Both projects have active maintainers.