Vite

Vite makes frontend development fast with instant hot module replacement and optimized builds. It serves your source files directly to the browser using native ES modules during development, so there's no bundling step. Change a file, see it in the browser instantly. The feedback loop is faster than anything Webpack gives you.

MIT license, created by Evan You (the Vue.js creator). Works with React, Vue, Svelte, Solid, vanilla JS. It's framework-agnostic. Uses esbuild for dependency pre-bundling and Rollup for production builds. The plugin ecosystem covers everything from PWA support to SSR.

Fully free. No paid tier, no cloud service. It's a dev tool you install in your project. Vite has essentially won the build tool war for new projects. Create React App is dead. Vue CLI migrated to Vite. SvelteKit uses Vite. Astro uses Vite. If you're starting a frontend project in 2026, you're probably using Vite whether you know it or not.

The catch: production builds use Rollup, not the same ESM approach as dev mode, which means occasional behavior differences between dev and prod. Rolldown (Vite's Rust-based replacement for Rollup) is coming but not stable yet. And for very large monorepos, the dev server can get slow. Turbopack in Next.js is specifically targeting that scale.