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Discussion on: I'm having some "not this again" feelings with Parcel, how should I be feeling about this tool?

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nepeckman

Parcel fits a niche in the tool ecosystem that is much different from the one Webpack occupies. Webpack is a very flexible and powerful tool, but this comes at the expense of complexity. I'd argue a lot of complexity. There's a reason that there exist so many tools that have the sole purpose of managing webpack configs and project structure. Parcel sacrifices a lot of this flexibility and power for speed and simplicity. It gives you default access to a lot of features that take time and setup in webpack. But if your codebase has specific needs that parcel doesn't understand, it may lack the flexibility needed to build your project.

I personally hope that parcel gains traction in projects with straightforward needs. If all you need to do is basic module imports and cache busting, webpack is overkill. On the other hand, if your build is very specific and complicated, parcel probably won't fill your needs. It comes down to making the tradeoffs that make sense for your situation. This is my experience as someone who helped implement webpack in a very complicated legacy codebase, and also someone who used parcel for some side projects that were small in scope and complexity.