Yarn vs NPM: Which Package Manager to Choose in 2024?

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. It is quite popular and has witnessed a boom during the past years. 

When you work with NodeJS, you will come across two popular package managers – NPM and Yarn. A package manager is a tool that helps you handle dependencies in a project automatically. Yarn vs NPM has always been a point of argument. This article will give the differences between Yarn and NPM, their advantages and disadvantages, speed and performance, security, and decide which package manager is better. 

Difference Between Yarn and NPM

Let us now discuss the difference between Yarn vs NPM in a more detailed way. 

A. Yarn vs NPM: Dependency Management 

The package-lock.json file, created by NPM, is also supported by Yarn, making it easy to migrate version data from NPM to Yarn.

B. Yarn vs NPM: Performance and Speed

Below image shows a comparison of time taken to install dependencies in various situations by NPM and Yarn.

C. Yarn vs NPM: Security

Below image shows a comparison of time taken to install dependencies in various situations by NPM and Yarn.

With NPM, you can also perform a manual audit to find any vulnerability and resolve it. To find vulnerabilities, you can use npm audit and to resolve them, you can use npm audit fix.

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D. NPM vs Yarn: Popularity

While Yarn is newer than NPM, it appears to be gaining popularity quickly.

In the below image, you can compare the number of downloads of NPM and Yarn in the last two years.

You can clearly see that NPM is the winner here.

However, if you compare the number of stars of both NPM and Yarn on GitHub, the trend will be something else.

Even if Yarn is newer than NPM, it has almost 7 times more stars than NPM. 

E. NPM vs Yarn: When to Use

There are various factors to choose between NPM and Yarn, here are few points to keep in mind:

The choice between Yarn and NPM depends on your specific project requirements and preferences. When deciding, consider the above factors we discussed to make a correct decision.

What is NPM?

NPM, or Node Package Manager, is the default package manager for Node.js and ships pre-installed when you download Node.js on your system. With NPM, it is quite easy and simple to install, manage and remove Node.js dependencies in your project.

NPM involves three things: 

• A website for managing various aspects of your NPM experience 
• A registry for public database of Node.js packages 
• A CLI for interacting via terminal 

Since, Node.js ships with NPM, to verify if you have NPM installed, run the following command in your terminal: 

npm -v 

To update NPM on your system, run the following command: 

npm install npm@latest -g 

What is Yarn?

Yarn, or Yet Another Resource Navigator, is a relatively new package manager developed by Facebook. It was developed to provide more advanced capabilities that NPM lacked at the time (such as version locking) while also making it safer, more reliable, and more efficient.

NPM has introduced several important features ever since Yarn was released. Yarn is now more of an alternative to NPM than a replacement in its current version. 

Since Yarn doesn’t come pre-installed with Node.js, it needs to be installed explicitly as: 

 npm install yarn -g 

Once installed globally, you can use it on a per-project basis by setting the desired version inside our project as below: 

yarn set version <version-name> 

Features of Yarn

1. Plug’n’Play: Starting from Yarn version 2, it no longer uses node_modules folder. Instead, it generates a .pnp.cjs file that maps dependencies for the project. This results in more optimal dependency trees and quicker project launch and package installation. 
2. Zero-Installs: This feature works in conjunction with Plug’n’Play, which uses the .pnp.cjs file to map packages in the offline cache. This allows you to quickly retrieve and install packages that have been saved. 
3. License checker: Yarn comes with a built-in license checker which is used during downloading and installing packages.

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Yarn and NPM Commands

Let us see the different commands for NPM and Yarn in different scenarios: 

If you notice, the commands for NPM and Yarn are quite similar. 

Similarities Between Yarn and NPM

Yarn and NPM have several common features: 

1. Both Yarn and NPM automatically generate a version lock file that keeps track of the exact list of dependencies used for the project. 
2. Both Yarn and NPM offer the option of saving dependencies in offline cache allowing you to install dependencies even if you’re offline. 
3. Yarn and NPM both support workspaces, allowing you to manage dependencies for numerous projects from a single repository. 
4. Using the npx command in NPM and the yarn dlx command in Yarn, you can run scripts remotely in both managers.

Which One is Better: NPM or Yarn?

To decide which package manager to choose, let us quickly look at the advantages and disadvantages of both Yarn and NPM.

A. Advantages and Disadvantages of Yarn

B. Advantages and Disadvantages of NPM

Which One to Choose? NPM vs Yarn

NPM is preferred by developers who are used to the workflow of the older versions and happy with the current workflow. It offers a decent user experience while also saving hard drive space. Yarn, on the other hand, has advanced features such as Plug’n’Play and Zero-Install to offer that improves performance and security marginally but at the cost of hard disk space. 

While NPM was the first to be introduced, Yarn has rapidly gained popularity in the JavaScript community. It took a lot of cues from NPM, especially overcoming its flaws, to create a package management tool that developers would love. Similarly, NPM has continued to counter with each new release, improving its capabilities to satisfy the needs of developers.

Conclusion

In this article, we learned about package management tools in Node.js. We deep-dived into the two most popular package managers for Node.js – NPM vs Yarn. We compared their features in detail. I hope now you will have a clearer understanding of what both Yarn and NPM have to offer and which package manager suits your requirements. 

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