head to head · open source
esbuild vs Rivet
esbuild has 40,063 GitHub stars, 1,346 forks, 622 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. Rivet has 6,152 stars, 251 forks, 269 open issues and last shipped yesterday. esbuild leads on adoption by 551% (40,063 vs 6,152 stars). esbuild is written in Go under MIT; Rivet is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. esbuild has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, Rivet 4%. Rivet 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 | Rivet | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 40K | ★ 6.2K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-08-09 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 251 |
| 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 Rivet if
- You want the Rivet feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and Rivet 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 Rivet
Rivet is an open source runtime for building stateful backends around in memory actors. It is written in Rust and released under the Apache 2.0 license, and it lives in the developer tools ecosystem for build and deployment, with topics that place it alongside Cloudflare Durable Objects, FoundationDB, serverless platforms, and realtime multiplayer infrastructure. An actor in Rivet is a long running, lightweight process that holds its state in memory while persisting that state automatically, so a developer creates one actor per agent, per session, or per user rather than managing a separate service for each.…
read the full Rivet overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is esbuild or Rivet more popular?
esbuild has 40,063 GitHub stars and Rivet has 6,152. esbuild has the larger community by that measure.
Are esbuild and Rivet free?
Both are open source. esbuild is licensed under MIT and Rivet under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between esbuild and Rivet?
esbuild is written in Go and Rivet 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 Rivet?
Choose esbuild if you want the larger community (40,063 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Rivet if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.