What is the difference between Bower and npm?

Question

What is the fundamental difference between bower and npm? Just want something plain and simple. I've seen some of my colleagues use bower and npm interchangeably in their projects.

Answer 1

This answer is an addition to the answer of Sindre Sorhus. The major difference between npm and Bower is the way they treat recursive dependencies. Note that they can be used together in a single project.

On the npm FAQ: (archive.org link from 6 Sep 2015)

It is much harder to avoid dependency conflicts without nesting dependencies. This is fundamental to the way that npm works, and has proven to be an extremely successful approach.

On Bower homepage:

Bower is optimized for the front-end. Bower uses a flat dependency tree, requiring only one version for each package, reducing page load to a minimum.

In short, npm aims for stability. Bower aims for minimal resource load. If you draw out the dependency structure, you will see this:

npm:

project root [node_modules] // default directory for dependencies  -> dependency A  -> dependency B     [node_modules]     -> dependency A   -> dependency C     [node_modules]     -> dependency B       [node_modules]        -> dependency A      -> dependency D 

As you can see it installs some dependencies recursively. Dependency A has three installed instances!

Bower:

project root [bower_components] // default directory for dependencies  -> dependency A  -> dependency B // needs A  -> dependency C // needs B and D  -> dependency D 

Here you see that all unique dependencies are on the same level.

So, why bother using npm?

Maybe dependency B requires a different version of dependency A than dependency C. npm installs both versions of this dependency so it will work anyway, but Bower will give you a conflict because it does not like duplication (because loading the same resource on a webpage is very inefficient and costly, also it can give some serious errors). You will have to manually pick which version you want to install. This can have the effect that one of the dependencies will break, but that is something that you will need to fix anyway.

So, the common usage is Bower for the packages that you want to publish on your webpages (e.g. runtime, where you avoid duplication), and use npm for other stuff, like testing, building, optimizing, checking, etc. (e.g. development time, where duplication is of less concern).

Update for npm 3:

npm 3 still does things differently compared to Bower. It will install the dependencies globally, but only for the first version it encounters. The other versions are installed in the tree (the parent module, then node_modules).

• [node_modules]
  • dep A v1.0
  • dep B v1.0
    • dep A v1.0 (uses root version)
  • dep C v1.0
    • dep A v2.0 (this version is different from the root version, so it will be an nested installation)

For more information, I suggest reading the docs of npm 3

Answer 2

All package managers have many downsides. You just have to pick which you can live with.

History

npm started out managing node.js modules (that's why packages go into node_modules by default), but it works for the front-end too when combined with Browserify or webpack.

Bower is created solely for the front-end and is optimized with that in mind.

Size of repo

npm is much, much larger than bower, including general purpose JavaScript (like country-data for country information or sorts for sorting functions that is usable on the front end or the back end).

Bower has a much smaller amount of packages.

Handling of styles etc

Bower includes styles etc.

npm is focused on JavaScript. Styles are either downloaded separately or required by something like npm-sass or sass-npm.

Dependency handling

The biggest difference is that npm does nested dependencies (but is flat by default) while Bower requires a flat dependency tree (puts the burden of dependency resolution on the user).

A nested dependency tree means that your dependencies can have their own dependencies which can have their own, and so on. This allows for two modules to require different versions of the same dependency and still work. Note since npm v3, the dependency tree will be flat by default (saving space) and only nest where needed, e.g., if two dependencies need their own version of Underscore.

Some projects use both: they use Bower for front-end packages and npm for developer tools like Yeoman, Grunt, Gulp, JSHint, CoffeeScript, etc.

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Resources

• Nested Dependencies - Insight into why node_modules works the way it does