head to head · open source
esbuild vs toast
esbuild has 40,108 GitHub stars, 1,364 forks, 622 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. toast has 1,635 stars, 39 forks, 9 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. esbuild leads on adoption by 2,353% (40,108 vs 1,635 stars). esbuild is written in Go under MIT; toast is written in Rust under MIT. esbuild has attracted 3% as many forks as stars, toast 2%. toast 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 | toast | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 40K | ★ 1.6K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-08-09 | 2026-10-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 39 |
| 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 toast if
- You want the toast feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and toast 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 toast
Toast 🥂 Toast is a tool for containerizing your workflows such as building and testing a project. You define tasks in a YAML file called a toastfile , and Toast runs them in a container based on a Docker image of your choosing. What constitutes a "task" is up to you: tasks can install system packages, compile an application, run a test suite, or even serve web pages. Tasks can depend on other tasks, so Toast can be understood as a high level containerized build system. Here's the toastfile for the example shown above: Toast caches each task by committing the container to an image. The image is tagged with a…
read the full toast overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is esbuild or toast more popular?
esbuild has 40,108 GitHub stars and toast has 1,635. esbuild has the larger community by that measure.
Are esbuild and toast free?
Both are open source. esbuild is licensed under MIT and toast under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between esbuild and toast?
esbuild is written in Go and toast 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 toast?
Choose esbuild if you want the larger community (40,108 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose toast if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.