Vite Just Got A Worthy Competitor

In my last article I have covered features of Next.js 13. One of these features is a significant performance improvement. As the Turbopack, a new alpha Next.js bundler, as the page states, is up to 700 times faster than Webpack.

Also, it is significantly faster than Vite. Here is a screen shot from the Turbopack we site that tells about it:

It says Turbopack is ten times faster than Vite. It didn’t go without the attention of Evan You, Vite bundler creator.

Since Vercel didn’t provide at that time benchmarks used to back up their numbers for HMR, Evan ran his own, and it appeared Next.js 13 with Turbopack (both from Vercel company) was only two times faster than Vite for root:

Going further, he noticed that the performance difference may be caused by Vite using Babel on default, rather than SWC.

According to Evan switching Vite to SWC is easy, and after doing it he got these results:

Meaning, both were comparably fast for root, but again Next.js 13 with Turbopack being almost two times faster for a leaf than Next.js with Vite.

In a response to Evan’s post, Vercel published their benchmarks and improved them based on provided feedback. Here are the detailed results for HMR:

According to the chart Turbopack is faster than Vite several times for small number of modules. The difference is growing significantly as a function of module count.

Discussing the benchmark result Evan You stated that:

To sum up, the "10x faster than Vite" claim only holds if all of the following are true:

Vite is not using the same SWC transform

The application contains over 30k modules

The benchmark only measures the time for the hot updated module to be evaluated, but not when the changes are actually applied.