esbuild

Esbuild does it 10-100x faster than Webpack. Written in Go, compiled to native code, parallelized from the ground up. A bundle that takes Webpack 30 seconds takes esbuild 300 milliseconds. Those aren't marketing numbers. That's what you'll actually see.

MIT license, created by Evan Wallace (co-founder of Figma). Handles JS, TypeScript, JSX, CSS, and JSON. Tree-shaking, minification, source maps, code splitting, the core bundling features are all there. Vite uses esbuild internally for dependency pre-bundling.

Fully free. It's a CLI tool and Go library. No paid tier, no hosted version. Solo to enterprise: free across the board. The only question is whether you use it directly or through Vite.

The catch is what esbuild deliberately doesn't do. No HMR (hot module replacement) for dev servers. No native HTML entry points. Limited plugin API compared to Webpack or Rollup. Evan Wallace has been explicit: esbuild is a bundler, not a framework. If you need a full dev server experience, use Vite (which uses esbuild under the hood). If you need a fast bundler for production builds, CI pipelines, or as a library inside other tools, esbuild is the engine to use.