Bower or NPM

I’ve been trying to chose between Bower or NPM as the tool I’m using for installing libraries. After using both for a little while I’m going to use Bower.

The main reason for this is because Bower is more for ‘front-end’ work, while I see NPM as more of a Node library loader. For me as a front-end developer I use Bower to get all the libraries I need for a project, for example AngularJS, Bootstrap and Gulp.

I see NPM as more of a tool for creating and managing your Node projects. As my experience using Node/ExpressJS grows I’ll probably use NPM a lot more.

But for me both package managers are a fantastic, when I look back at when I started building websites and I had to find, download, unzip, copy over to my folder, update the links in my HTML, all to install jQuery. So now we as web developers are lucky to have tools like Bower and NPM.