head to head · open source
esbuild vs farm
esbuild has 40,120 GitHub stars, 1,368 forks, 622 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. farm has 5,597 stars, 190 forks, 211 open issues and last shipped today. esbuild leads on adoption by 617% (40,120 vs 5,597 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%. farm 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 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 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
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 farm
Extremely fast, Vite compatible web build tool written in Rust English 简体中文 Intro Farm is an extremely fast, Vite compatible web build tool written in Rust. Designed to be fast, powerful, and consistent, it delivers the best web development experience — the real next generation build tool. Online experience Why Farm? See Why Farm for details. In short, tools like webpack are too slow, but new tools like Vite are not perfect, Vite has a lot of drawbacks when comes to a large project: A huge number of requests during development ：when there are hundreds or thousands modules per page, loading performance severely…
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Frequently asked questions
Is esbuild or farm more popular?
esbuild has 40,120 GitHub stars and farm has 5,597. 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 (40,120 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose farm if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.