javascript - What is the difference between Bower and npm?

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What is the fundamental
difference between bower and npm? Just
want something plain and simple. I've seen some of my colleagues use
bower and npm interchangeably in their
projects.

Answer

All package managers have many downsides. You
just have to pick which you can live
with.

History

href="https://www.npmjs.org" rel="noreferrer">npm started out managing
node.js modules (that's why packages go into node_modules by
default), but it works for the front-end too when combined with href="http://browserify.org/" rel="noreferrer">Browserify or href="https://webpack.js.org/"
rel="noreferrer">webpack.

href="http://bower.io" rel="noreferrer">Bower is created solely for the
front-end and is optimized with that in mind.

Size of
repo

npm is much, much larger than bower,
including general purpose JavaScript (like country-data for
country information or sorts for sorting functions that is
usable on the front end or the back end).

Bower
has a much smaller amount of packages.

Handling
of styles etc

Bower includes styles etc.

npm is focused on JavaScript. Styles
are either downloaded separately or required by something like
npm-sass or
sass-npm.

Dependency
handling

The biggest difference is that npm
does nested dependencies (but is flat by default) while Bower requires a flat dependency
tree (puts the burden of dependency resolution on the
user).

A nested dependency tree means
that your dependencies can have their own dependencies which can have their own, and so
on. This allows for two modules to require different versions of the same dependency and
still work. Note since npm v3, the dependency tree will by flat by default (saving
space) and only nest where needed, e.g., if two dependencies need their own version of
Underscore.

Some projects use both is that they
use Bower for front-end packages and npm for developer tools like Yeoman, Grunt, Gulp,
JSHint, CoffeeScript, etc.

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