head to head · open source
parcel vs Rivet
parcel has 44,025 GitHub stars, 2,284 forks, 606 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. Rivet has 6,144 stars, 249 forks, 269 open issues and last shipped yesterday. parcel leads on adoption by 617% (44,025 vs 6,144 stars). parcel is written in JavaScript under MIT; Rivet is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. parcel has attracted 5% 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
| parcel | Rivet | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 44K | ★ 6.1K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-06 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.3K | ⑂ 249 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick parcel if
- You weight community size — 44K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- 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 parcel
Parcel is a zero configuration build tool for the web, distributed as the parcel package on npm and licensed under MIT. It lives in the JavaScript ecosystem and is written primarily in JavaScript, with its JavaScript compiler implemented in Rust for native performance. The project has been developed for roughly nine years, carries more than 44,000 stars and over 2,200 forks on GitHub, and its documentation is hosted at parceljs.org.
read the full parcel 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 parcel or Rivet more popular?
parcel has 44,025 GitHub stars and Rivet has 6,144. parcel has the larger community by that measure.
Are parcel and Rivet free?
Both are open source. parcel is licensed under MIT and Rivet under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between parcel and Rivet?
parcel is written in JavaScript 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, parcel or Rivet?
Choose parcel if you want the larger community (44,025 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Rivet if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.