Choosing the build tool for your next project can be cumbersome. There is a long list of candidates — the old guard like Gulp and Grunt, and newer bundlers like Vite, esbuild, Rollup, Parcel, and webpack — and each has different strengths around code splitting, asset hashing, module importing, non-JS resources, output formats, and pre-deployment transformations.
Tooling.Report, built by the web.dev team, compares build tools with a straight-forward feature matrix: 48 hand-written configuration tests, each built with the tool authors to cover one production concern (code splitting, hashing, module importing, non-JS resources, output formats, transformations). Instead of reading marketing pages, you can see exactly which tool passes which test and copy the winning config straight from the results.
A note if you’re reading this in 2026: the site is still up but its comparison matrix hasn’t been refreshed since early 2022, so newer entrants like Vite and esbuild (which now dominate new projects — Vite alone now sees well over 100 million npm downloads a week) aren’t scored there. Use Tooling.Report to compare the classic four — browserify, Parcel, Rollup, and webpack — and treat Vite/esbuild as the default starting point for anything greenfield.