head to head · open source
esbuild vs captain
esbuild has 40,120 GitHub stars, 1,368 forks, 622 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. captain has 775 stars, 48 forks, 20 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. esbuild leads on adoption by 5,077% (40,120 vs 775 stars). esbuild is written in Go under MIT; captain is written in Go under MIT. esbuild has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, captain 6%. captain was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| esbuild | captain | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 40K | ★ 775 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-08-09 | 2026-09-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 48 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick esbuild if
- You weight community size — 40K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick captain if
- You want the captain feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and captain fits your workflow better
About esbuild
Website Getting started Documentation Plugins FAQ Why? Our current build tools for the web are 10 100x slower than they could be: The main goal of the esbuild bundler project is to bring about a new era of build tool performance, and create an easy to use modern bundler along the way. Major features: Extreme speed without needing a cache JavaScript, CSS, TypeScript, and JSX built in A straightforward API for CLI, JS, and Go Bundles ESM and CommonJS modules Bundles CSS including CSS modules Tree shaking, minification, and source maps Local server, watch mode, and plugins Check out the getting started instructions…
read the full esbuild overview →
About captain
Introduction Captain Convert your Git workflow to Docker containers ready for Continuous Delivery Define your workflow in the captain.yaml and use captain to your Continuous Delivery service to create containers for each commit, test them and push them to your registry only when tests passes. Use captain build to build your Dockerfile(s) of your repository. If your repository has local changes the containers will only be tagged as latest , otherwise the containers will be tagged as latest , COMMIT ID & BRANCH NAME . Now your Git commit tree is reproduced in your local docker repository. Use captain test to run…
read the full captain overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is esbuild or captain more popular?
esbuild has 40,120 GitHub stars and captain has 775. esbuild has the larger community by that measure.
Are esbuild and captain free?
Both are open source. esbuild is licensed under MIT and captain under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between esbuild and captain?
esbuild is written in Go and captain in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, esbuild or captain?
Choose esbuild if you want the larger community (40,120 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose captain if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.