head to head · open source
esbuild vs sbt
esbuild has 40,120 GitHub stars, 1,368 forks, 622 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. sbt has 4,953 stars, 1,053 forks, 498 open issues and last shipped yesterday. esbuild leads on adoption by 710% (40,120 vs 4,953 stars). esbuild is written in Go under MIT; sbt is written in Scala under Apache-2.0. esbuild has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, sbt 21%. sbt 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 | sbt | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 40K | ★ 5.0K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Scala |
| Last push | 2026-08-09 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 sbt if
- You want the sbt feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Scala
- You evaluated both and sbt 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 sbt
[sbt/sbt zero seven]: [CONTRIBUTING]: CONTRIBUTING.md [contributing docs]: contributing docs/README.md [Setup]: [FAQ]: [sbt dev]: [searching]: [asking]: [LICENSE]: LICENSE [sbt/io]: [sbt/zinc]: [sbt/sbt]: sbt === sbt is a build tool for Scala, Java, and more. For general documentation, see sbt 2.x This is the 2.x series of sbt. The source code of sbt is split across several GitHub repositories, including this one. [sbt/io][sbt/io] hosts sbt.io module. [sbt/zinc][sbt/zinc] hosts Zinc, an incremental compiler for Scala. [sbt/sbt][sbt/sbt], this repository hosts modules that implement the build tool. Other links…
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Frequently asked questions
Is esbuild or sbt more popular?
esbuild has 40,120 GitHub stars and sbt has 4,953. esbuild has the larger community by that measure.
Are esbuild and sbt free?
Both are open source. esbuild is licensed under MIT and sbt under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between esbuild and sbt?
esbuild is written in Go and sbt in Scala. 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 sbt?
Choose esbuild if you want the larger community (40,120 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose sbt if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.