Comparisons with Other No-Bundler Solutions

Production Build Handling

Snowpack’s default build output is unbundled: it transforms each file into separate built modules, which can then be fed into different “optimizers” that perform the actual bundling. The benefit of this is that you can choose between different end-bundlers (e.g. webpack, Rollup, or even ESbuild), the downside is that it’s a bit of a fragmented experience - for example, the esbuild optimizer is still unstable, the Rollup optimizer is not officially maintained, and different optimizers have different output and configurations.

First Class Vue Support

Vite was initially created to serve as the future foundation of tooling. Although as of 2.0 Vite is now fully framework-agnostic, the official Vue plugin still provides first-class support for Vue’s Single File Component format, covering all advanced features such as template asset reference resolving, <script setup>, , custom blocks and more. In addition, Vite provides fine-grained HMR for Vue SFCs. For example, updating the <template> or <style> of an SFC will perform hot updates without resetting its state.

WMR is mainly designed for Preact projects, and offers more integrated features such as pre-rendering. In terms of scope, it’s closer to a Preact meta framework, with the same emphasis on compact size as Preact itself. If you are using Preact, WMR is likely going to offer a more fine-tuned experience. However, it’s unlikely for WMR to prioritize support for other frameworks.

(previously ) is a great project and Vite 1.0’s Koa-based server setup was inspired by it.

Overall, Vite is a more opinionated / higher-level tool that aims to provide a more streamlined workflow compared to @web/dev-server. That said, the umbrella project contains many other excellent tools that may benefit Vite users as well.