head to head · open source
esbuild vs phing
esbuild has 40,120 GitHub stars, 1,368 forks, 622 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. phing has 1,163 stars, 318 forks, 6 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. esbuild leads on adoption by 3,350% (40,120 vs 1,163 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 | 2026-10-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 318 |
| 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
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 phing
Thank you for using PHING! PH ing I s N ot G NU make; it's a PHP project build system or build tool based on Apache Ant. You can do anything with it that you could do with a traditional build system like GNU make, and its use of simple XML build files and extensible PHP "task" classes make it an easy to use and highly flexible build framework. Features include running PHPUnit unit tests (including test result and coverage reports), file transformations (e.g. token replacement, XSLT transformation, template transformations), file system operations, interactive build support, SQL execution, SCM operations (Git…
read the full phing overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is esbuild or phing more popular?
esbuild has 40,120 GitHub stars and phing has 1,163. 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 (40,120 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose phing if its feature set, stack or LGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.