Babel
Ranked 5 of 5 JavaScript compilers by recommenders
Free JavaScript compiler praised for powerful code transformation and its established ecosystem. Critics call it slow and bloated, and say faster tools like SWC and OXC are replacing it.
Free JavaScript compiler praised for powerful code transformation and its established ecosystem. Critics call it slow and bloated, and say faster tools like SWC and OXC are replacing it.
19 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 5
- criticize it
- 14
- approval share
- 26%
Recommended in 4 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 5 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 0.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 4 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Teams switching to SWC or OXC
“We switched a CI pipeline from babel to SWC last year”
Comment from 23 Feb 2026 in “The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler” “No more babel in my compilation pipeline, yay!”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite” “now I'll be able to get rid of Babel, too.”
Comment from 5 Sep 2026 in “The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite” Painful upgrades and tangled tooling
“Upgrading eg Webpack and Babel and polyfill stacks and all that across multiple major versions is a serious mess.”
Comment from 22 Mar 2026 in “The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat” “A lot of the modern tooling feels like a rube goldberg machine when it goes wrong.”
Comment from 12 Dec 2025 in “The Tor Project is switching to Rust” “led to the creation of weird ecosystem like babel, webpack, eslint”
Comment from 19 May 2026 in “Mini Shai-Hulud Strikes Again: 314 npm Packages Compromised” - Comment from 1 Jun 2026 in “NPM packages from RedHat have been compromised”
Bloated dependencies and output
“Build systems (especially Babel and Webpack) were the first big culprits in terms of dependency bloat”
Comment from 23 Mar 2026 in “The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat” “the output is bloated (and slower to execute, since passes like regenerator have a lot of overhead)”
Comment from 22 Mar 2026 in “The Three Pillars of JavaScript Bloat” “where you need a massive node_modules folder and Babel just to generate client-side code”
Comment from 31 May 2026 in “The Website Specification” Slow full builds
“Compiling at work took a minute for full builds with babel”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite” “OXC Transformers are amazingly faster than Babel”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “The Rust React Compiler is now native in Vite”
Other JavaScript compilers people recommend
The four most recommended other JavaScript compilers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oxc | 14 | 6 | 70% | 9 | — | Approved |
| React Compiler | 10 | 6 | 63% | 7 | — | — |
| SWC | 8 | 1 | 89% | 6 | — | — |
| Google Closure Compiler | 6 | 2 | 75% | 5 | — | — |
| BabelThis page | 5 | 14 | 26% | 4 | — | — |
What people said
All 20 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“now I'll be able to get rid of Babel, too.”
“OXC Transformers are amazingly faster than Babel”
“Compiling at work took a minute for full builds with babel”
“No more babel in my compilation pipeline, yay!”
“deploy with `babel` and with some compatibility in mind”
“Python (babel.date) and Javascript (the browser's locale) both have locale-aware date rendering”
“Babel allows a fantastic degree of power in code transformation”
“the problems caused by Babel shorthands (which is what " is in German)”
“I just don't understand the rationale for picking Babel over OXC or something else as the interchange format”
“the babel and webpack situation, which is truly kafkaesque”
“where you need a massive node_modules folder and Babel just to generate client-side code”
“led to the creation of weird ecosystem like babel, webpack, eslint”
“Build systems (especially Babel and Webpack) were the first big culprits in terms of dependency bloat”
“Upgrading eg Webpack and Babel and polyfill stacks and all that across multiple major versions is a serious mess.”
“the output is bloated (and slower to execute, since passes like regenerator have a lot of overhead)”
“We switched a CI pipeline from babel to SWC last year”
“babel plugins can make arbitrary changes to the AST”
“The whole babel/transpiling thing was meant to be temporary.”
“A lot of the modern tooling feels like a rube goldberg machine when it goes wrong.”
“Babel is good if you want a well established app though.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.