Yarn
Ranked 14 of 30 package managers by recommenders
People recommend Yarn for reproducible installs, zero-install committed dependencies and faster installs on large monorepos. Critics say classic Yarn 1 is unmaintained and security-wise a dead end.
15 people recommended Yarn in Hacker News comments, 10 had mixed feelings and 15 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026.
Summary written by Claude from 42 comments. It was written before the November 2026 recount, and 38 of those comments still count.
40 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 15
- mixed feelings
- 10
- warn against or regret it
- 15
The record
Recommended in 7 of 12 months
In 13 different threads.
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 15 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1 recommender for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 7 of 12 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
- Recommended in 13 threadsNeeds 5 or more, met.
- The biggest thread supplies 13% of its recommendersNeeds half or less, met.
The same rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. Mixed feelings count toward neither side. How the badge works
What people say about it
Reasons grouped from a sample of 39 of the 48 opinions about it, picked in proportion to how many people recommend it, have mixed feelings and criticize it. Each mark is one comment in the sample. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Commit dependencies to the repo
“it just feels good knowing that my repo contains everything needed to install and run any version of my project”
Comment from 11 Jun 2026 in “Upcoming breaking changes for NPM v12” “The main benefit with yarn berry (v4+) is being able to commit the dependencies to the repo”
Comment from 17 Mar 2026 in “Why Node.js needs a virtual file system” “Run Yarn in zero-installs mode (or equivalent for your package manager”
Comment from 31 Mar 2026 in “Axios Compromised on NPM – Malicious Versions Drop Remote Access Trojan” - Comment from 17 Mar 2026 in “Why Node.js needs a virtual file system”
Faster installs, especially on Windows
“Both yarn and pnpm support http/2 which speeds up the bazillion requests quite a bit.”
Comment from 28 Apr 2026 in “NPM Website Is Down” “yarn installs deps much faster than NPM”
Comment from 10 Jun 2026 in “Upcoming breaking changes for NPM v12” “Makes a massive difference in windows.”
Comment from 5 Jun 2026 in “WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access” Zero-installs removes npm pain
“yarn with zero-installs removes an awful lot of pain present in npm and pnpm”
Comment from 17 Mar 2026 in “Why Node.js needs a virtual file system” “For many years I was using yarn with 0 issue on massive monorepos”
Comment from 18 Mar 2026 in “Why Node.js needs a virtual file system” Consistent installs across teams
“Modern Yarn releases (4.x) are deterministic to a fault and you can rely on it to have a consistent behavior across your whole team”
Comment from 10 Jun 2026 in “Upcoming breaking changes for NPM v12”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Classic Yarn unmaintained and unpatched
“It was a giant mistake to keep 'classic' (umnaintained, unpatched) yarn around.”
Comment from 10 Jun 2026 in “Upcoming breaking changes for NPM v12” “Yarn is unfortunately a dead-end security-wise under current maintainership.”
Comment from 14 Dec 2025 in “Shai-Hulud compromised a dev machine and raided GitHub org access: a post-mortem” “we replaced Yarn Classic with Bun for package management”
Comment from 2 Dec 2025 in “Anthropic Acquires Bun” Too many competing tools and churn
“NPM+Yarn+$package-package-manager of the day to solve the problems the whole ecosystem and the so-called solutions creates twice”
Comment from 22 Mar 2026 in “Revert "userdb: add birthDate field to JSON user records” “drowning in the sea of npm/yarn/berry/pnpm”
Comment from 22 May 2026 in “Deno 2.8” Resolver changes and platform inconsistency
“I prefer things to just work rather than debug what is and isn't broken by the new resolver.”
Comment from 2 Dec 2025 in “Anthropic acquires Bun” “Deterministic to a fault unless you mix Windows and Linux.”
Comment from 10 Jun 2026 in “Upcoming breaking changes for NPM v12” Install scripts run arbitrary code
“it still executes build scripts willy-nilly”
Comment from 24 Nov 2025 in “Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected”
Other package managers people recommend
The four most recommended other package managers, 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.
See all 30 package managers, rankedWhat people said
39 of the 48 opinions about it, picked in proportion to the three counts, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“been bitten by the many issue with Yarn over the years”
“sneaky bugs, random packages needing updates”
“third party tools will change, it happen to my team with Yarn classic”
“Use pnpm or yarn, also available with node.”
“Yarn is usually the next best thing but there seems to be something off with the video in this case”
“it just feels good knowing that my repo contains everything needed to install and run any version of my project”
“we should have do something about it”
“It was a giant mistake to keep 'classic' (umnaintained, unpatched) yarn around.”
“Deterministic to a fault unless you mix Windows and Linux.”
“we closely track performances and Yarn and pnpm and pretty much on similar level”
“yarn installs deps much faster than NPM”
“Modern Yarn releases (4.x) are deterministic to a fault and you can rely on it to have a consistent behavior across your whole team”
“it's slow as hell, but it works”
“I wonder if there are still reasons to use yarn?”
“Makes a massive difference in windows.”
“It comes far down their priority list”
“which has an option to prevent you from installing an npm package for the first number of days of its release”
“drowning in the sea of npm/yarn/berry/pnpm”
“it had saner dependency resolution”
“Both yarn and pnpm support http/2 which speeds up the bazillion requests quite a bit.”
“I use yarn or pnpm for monorepos.”
“Run Yarn in zero-installs mode (or equivalent for your package manager”
“NPM+Yarn+$package-package-manager of the day to solve the problems the whole ecosystem and the so-called solutions creates twice”
“For many years I was using yarn with 0 issue on massive monorepos”
“The main benefit with yarn berry (v4+) is being able to commit the dependencies to the repo”
“I've outlined the major yarn benefit to me”
“yarn with zero-installs removes an awful lot of pain present in npm and pnpm”
“Yarn, pnpm, webpack all have solutions for this”
“Zip files make so much more sense, I really liked that about Yarn.”
“These mostly solve the issue of adding postinstall scripts and packages being compromised.”
“I can't even get them to use TypeScript or to migrate from Yarn v1.”
“is better than the old node_modules approach for other reasons”
“don't support other languages”
“Yarn is unfortunately a dead-end security-wise under current maintainership.”
“I prefer things to just work rather than debug what is and isn't broken by the new resolver.”
“we replaced Yarn Classic with Bun for package management”
“We also suggest you make use of the minimumReleaseAge setting present both in yarn and pnpm.”
“it still executes build scripts willy-nilly”
“The Javascript ecosystem however (nodejs, npm, yarn etc) are what take away from an otherwise excellent programming language.”
Counts come from 1,791,911 Hacker News comments labeled by Claude, November 2025 to October 2026, with data through October 31, 2026. Counts updated 2 Nov 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.