You may have come across pnpm through discussions with fellow developers, reading blog posts, watching videos, or attending developer conferences. You have probably heard its praises: it's fast, disk-space efficient, and great for monorepos.
However, you might wonder: who is actually using pnpm?
A growing popularity
At the time of writing, pnpm has over 24k stars on GitHub, and this number is rapidly increasing. The pnpm Twitter account maintains a thread that tracks the number of stars. Each time the GitHub repository gains 1k stars, a new tweet is posted. For quite some time now, it has been growing by 1K every two months.
Another indicator of its growing popularity is its number of downloads. If you go to npm stats you can see how this number evolved compared to npm and yarn.
I believe this diagram speaks for itself 🚀.
Which companies are using pnpm?
There is a page on pnpm's documentation about well-known companies using pnpm.
You can also see some other companies on the StackShare website (but it seems not many companies took the time to fill in the fact that they were using pnpm in their stack).
Which popular open-source projects are using pnpm?
If you see a pnpm-lock.yaml or a pnpm-workspace.yaml file in a GitHub repository, then that project is definitively using pnpm to manage its dependencies. You can use this technique to find GitHub projects using pnpm by querying them with GitHub code search.
I thought it would be interesting to explore which package managers are utilized in the development of popular JavaScript framework projects. And guess what? Many JavaScript frameworks are developed using pnpm 💖.
💡To check that these projects were using pnpm, I not only verify the presence of pnpm specific files but also checked their continuous integration pipelines (contained in the .github folder) to see what they were using to manage their dependencies.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of popular JavaScript web frameworks that use pnpm as their package manager:
- Vue
- Nuxt
- Next.js
- SvelteKit
- SolidStart
- Astro
- Qwik
That's quite an impressive list: most modern JavaScript web frameworks seem to have chosen pnpm. That's also the case for popular frontend tooling projects like Vite or Turbo.
💡The fact that pnpm is utilized by maintainers for internal development of these frameworks does not imply that these frameworks can only be used with pnpm. Typically, JavaScript frameworks are "package manager" agnostic, allowing you to use your preferred package manager when developing a project with one of these frameworks.
Should you use pnpm because others do?
Short answer: no.
Choosing a technology solely based on its popularity is not advisable. While popularity is a factor to consider, it should not be the only determining aspect. Thus, you should not use pnpm because well-known companies or popular open-source projects use it.
However (and here's the long answer 😉), you should consider exploring pnpm, as there must be a reason why all these intelligent individuals have chosen it over npm or yarn. Investigate the issues pnpm resolves for them; perhaps you face similar challenges in your projects. See what problems pnpm solves for them, maybe you have the same problems in your projects. You might not even be aware of certain problems (such as lengthy CI due to time-consuming package installations, excessive space occupied by node modules, or issues with hoisted node modules), but pnpm could potentially make some things easier. Nevertheless, if you are satisfied with your current package manager, there is no need to switch just to imitate the popular frameworks projects.
I believe people are familiar with npm since it is the default package manager for Node.js projects. They might also know about yarn because it was initially developed by Facebook (who created React) and addressed some issues with npm. However, people recognize and utilize pnpm due to its performance and ability to resolve the problems they might encounter with npm package management. That's also why I use pnpm; it does the job, and it does it quickly.
Now you know that you're not alone in using pnpm; from renowned companies to popular open-source projects, many people are utilizing it.
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