head to head · open source
esbuild vs farm
esbuild has 40,063 GitHub stars, 1,346 forks, 622 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. farm has 5,590 stars, 190 forks, 211 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. esbuild leads on adoption by 617% (40,063 vs 5,590 stars). esbuild is written in Go under MIT; farm is written in Rust under MIT. esbuild has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, farm 3%. esbuild was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (bundler, compiler, typescript), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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 | farm | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 40K | ★ 5.6K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-08-09 | 2026-06-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 190 |
| 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 farm if
- You want the farm feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and farm fits your workflow better
About esbuild
esbuild is an MIT licensed, Go based bundler for the web that compiles JavaScript, CSS, TypeScript, and JSX in one tool, aimed at front end developers and teams whose current web build pipelines are slower than they need to be.
read the full esbuild overview →
About farm
Farm is a web build tool written in Rust and distributed under the MIT license. It lives in the JavaScript and TypeScript frontend tooling ecosystem, where it sits alongside bundlers such as webpack and Vite, and it is designed to be compatible with Vite so that existing plugins can be reused. The project is hosted on GitHub, has reached a 1.0 stable release that the README describes as production ready, and ships with documentation and an online playground at farmfe.org.
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Frequently asked questions
Is esbuild or farm more popular?
esbuild has 40,063 GitHub stars and farm has 5,590. esbuild has the larger community by that measure.
Are esbuild and farm free?
Both are open source. esbuild is licensed under MIT and farm under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between esbuild and farm?
esbuild is written in Go and farm in Rust. 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 farm?
Choose esbuild if you want the larger community (40,063 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose farm if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.