head to head · open source
esbuild vs phing
esbuild has 40,063 GitHub stars, 1,346 forks, 622 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. phing has 1,168 stars, 319 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 16 days ago. esbuild leads on adoption by 3,330% (40,063 vs 1,168 stars). esbuild is written in Go under MIT; phing is written in PHP under LGPL-3.0. esbuild has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, phing 27%. phing 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 | phing | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 40K | ★ 1.2K |
| License | MIT | LGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-08-09 | 2026-09-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 319 |
| 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 phing if
- You want the phing feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the LGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and phing 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 phing
PHing is a PHP project build system and build tool based on Apache Ant — the name expands to "PHing Is Not GNU make" — and it is meant for PHP teams that want to automate packaging, deployment, and testing through simple XML build files and extensible PHP "task" classes instead of ad hoc scripts.
read the full phing overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is esbuild or phing more popular?
esbuild has 40,063 GitHub stars and phing has 1,168. esbuild has the larger community by that measure.
Are esbuild and phing free?
Both are open source. esbuild is licensed under MIT and phing under LGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between esbuild and phing?
esbuild is written in Go and phing in PHP. 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 phing?
Choose esbuild if you want the larger community (40,063 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose phing if its feature set, stack or LGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.