Rspack Has a Free Webpack-Compatible Bundler — 10x Faster Builds

Your webpack builds take 30 seconds. Rspack does the same in 3.

What is Rspack?

Rspack is a high-performance bundler written in Rust, designed as a drop-in replacement for webpack. Same config format, same plugin API, same loader compatibility — just 5-10x faster.

Built by the ByteDance web infra team (the company behind TikTok), Rspack now powers thousands of internal projects.

Why Rspack Is Taking Over

1. Drop-In Webpack Replacement

// rspack.config.js — looks exactly like webpack.config.js
module.exports = {
  entry: './src/index.tsx',
  module: {
    rules: [
      {
        test: /\.tsx?$/,
        use: 'builtin:swc-loader',
        options: {
          jsc: { parser: { syntax: 'typescript', tsx: true } }
        }
      },
      {
        test: /\.css$/,
        type: 'css',
      }
    ]
  },
  output: {
    filename: '[name].[contenthash].js',
    path: './dist'
  }
};

2. Built-in SWC Loader

No need for babel-loader + @babel/preset-env + @babel/preset-react + @babel/preset-typescript. Rspack includes SWC natively:

{
  test: /\.[jt]sx?$/,
  use: {
    loader: 'builtin:swc-loader',
    options: {
      jsc: {
        parser: { syntax: 'typescript', tsx: true },
        transform: { react: { runtime: 'automatic' } }
      }
    }
  }
}

One loader replaces four.

3. Webpack Plugin Compatibility

const rspack = require('@rspack/core');

module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    new rspack.HtmlRspackPlugin({ template: './index.html' }),
    new rspack.CopyRspackPlugin({ patterns: [{ from: 'public' }] }),
    // Most webpack plugins work too
    new (require('webpack-bundle-analyzer').BundleAnalyzerPlugin)(),
  ]
};

4. Module Federation 2.0

const { ModuleFederationPlugin } = require('@module-federation/enhanced/rspack');

module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    new ModuleFederationPlugin({
      name: 'app1',
      exposes: { './Button': './src/Button' },
      shared: ['react', 'react-dom'],
    })
  ]
};

5. CSS Support Without Loaders

module.exports = {
  module: {
    rules: [
      { test: /\.css$/, type: 'css' },
      { test: /\.module\.css$/, type: 'css/module' },
    ]
  },
  experiments: {
    css: true
  }
};

No css-loader, style-loader, or mini-css-extract-plugin. Built in.

Performance Benchmarks

Metric	Webpack 5	Rspack
Cold start	30s	3s
HMR	500ms	50ms
Production build	60s	8s
Memory usage	1.5GB	400MB

Based on a large React app with 10K+ modules

Migration from Webpack

# Install
npm install @rspack/core @rspack/cli -D

# Rename config
mv webpack.config.js rspack.config.js

# Replace built-in plugins
# HtmlWebpackPlugin → rspack.HtmlRspackPlugin
# MiniCssExtractPlugin → type: 'css' (built-in)

# Update scripts
# "build": "webpack" → "build": "rspack build"
# "dev": "webpack serve" → "dev": "rspack serve"

Most projects migrate in under an hour.

The Bottom Line

Rspack gives you webpack's ecosystem with Rust's speed. If your builds are slow and you can't rewrite your webpack config for Vite — Rspack is the answer.

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