website/docs/comparison.mdx
import { DockerTable, GeneratorTable, JavaScriptTable, OtherSystemsTable, ProjectsTable, TasksTable, TaskRunnerTable, ToolchainTable, WorkspaceTable, } from '@site/src/components/ComparisonTable'; import ComparisonColumn from '@site/src/components/ComparisonColumn';
The following comparisons are not an exhaustive list of features, and may be inaccurate or out of date, but represent a good starting point for investigation. If something is not correct, please create an issue or submit a patch.
Before diving into our comparisons below, we highly suggest reading monorepo.tools for a deeper insight into monorepos and available tooling. It's a great resource for learning about the current state of things and the ecosystem.
:::info
Looking to migrate from Nx or Turborepo to moon? Use our
moon ext migrate-nx or
moon ext migrate-turborepo commands for a (somewhat)
seamless migration!
:::
Although moon is still in its infancy, we provide an array of powerful features that other frontend centric task runners do not, such as...
Curious to learn more? Check out the "Why use moon?" or "Features" sections for more information, or these wonderful articles provided by the community:
At a high-level, Turborepo and moon seem very similar as they both claim to be task runners. They
both support incremental builds, content/smart hashing, local and remote caching<sup>1</sup>,
parallel execution, and everything else you'd expect from a task runner. But that's where the
similarities stop, because in the end, Turborepo is nothing more than a package.json scripts
orchestrator with a caching layer. While moon also supports this, it
aims to be far more with a heavy focus on the developer experience.
In the next section, we'll be talking about a few key areas that we deem important to consumers. If you'd prefer a more granular comparison, jump down to the comparison tables.
<ComparisonColumn left={ <>
Turborepo only supports the Node.js ecosystem, so implicitly uses a conventions based approach. It provides very little to no configuration for customizing Turborepo to your needs.
</> } right={ <>
moon is language agnostic, with initial support for Node.js and its ecosystem. Because of this, moon provides a ton of configuration for customizing moon to your needs. It prefers a configuration over conventions approach, as every repository is different.
</> } />
<ComparisonColumn left={ <>
Turborepo infers projects from package.json workspaces, and does not support non-JavaScript based
projects.
</> } right={ <>
moon requires projects to be defined in .moon/workspace.*, and supports any programming
language<sup>2</sup>.
</> } />
<ComparisonColumn left={ <>
Turborepo requires package.json scripts to be defined for every project. This results in the same
scripts being repeated constantly.
</> } right={ <>
moon avoids this overhead by using task inheritance. No more repetition.
</> } />
<ComparisonColumn left={ <>
Each pipeline in turbo.json must be individually ran as a step in CI. Scripts not configured as
pipeline tasks are never ran.
</> } right={ <>
moon runs every task automatically using moon ci, which also supports parallelism/sharding.
</> } />
<ComparisonColumn left={ <>
Turborepo is in the process of being rewritten in Rust, with its codebase being shared and coupled with the new Turbopack library, a Rust based bundler.
Outside of this, there are no publicly available plans for Turborepo's future.
</> } right={ <>
moon plans to be so much more than a task runner, with one such facet being a repository management tool. This includes code ownership, dependency management and auditing, repository linting, in-repo secrets, and anything else we deem viable.
We also plan to support additional languages as first-class citizens within our toolchain.
</> } />
<small>Turborepo remote caching is powered by Vercel. moon provides its own paid service.
moon projects may run commands for any language, but not all languages are supported in the toolchain.
Lerna was a fantastic tool that helped the JavaScript ecosystem grow and excelled at package versioning and publishing (and still does), but it offered a very rudimentary task runner. While Lerna was able to run scripts in parallel, it wasn't the most efficient, as it did not support caching, hashing, or performant scheduling.
However, the reason Lerna is not compared in-depth, is that Lerna was unowned and unmaintained for quite some time, and has recently fallen under the Nx umbrella. Lerna is basically Nx lite now.