Changesets vs Lerna
Changesets
changesets.devLerna
lerna.js.orgSide by side
| Figure | Changesets | Lerna |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $29/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · Monorepo Management Tools | 7.6 (#21) | 8.1 (#12) |
| Publishing | The CLI can update package versions and changelogs, then publish packages to npm. | Lerna manages versioning and publishing packages to npm and supports fixed or independent versioning workflows. |
| Publishing security | The publishing guide advises protecting access tokens and recommends trusted publishing for CI where possible. | Lerna 9.0.0 and later support npm OIDC trusted publishing so packages can publish without traditional fixed tokens. |
Plans
In their own words
Changesets
Changesets has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
Lerna
Lerna is a free, open-source build system for managing and publishing JavaScript and TypeScript packages from one repository. It runs commands across projects in an efficient order and can parallelize tasks, cache results, and distribute work across machines. When task files and terminal output are already in its computation cache, Lerna can restore them instead of rerunning the task. It manages package versioning and npm publishing, with fixed or independent versioning workflows, and includes an interactive graph for viewing workspace structure and dependencies. Lerna uses Nx to identify workspace packages and dependencies and to run scripts with parallelism, caching, and distribution. It supports npm, yarn, pnpm, and bun; dependency installation and linking should be handled through those package managers’ workspace features. Nx Cloud has a free Hobby plan, a Team plan at $29 a month, and Enterprise with custom pricing. For closed-source projects, Nx Cloud provides the first 500 computation hours per month free, then charges $1 per computation hour. Its Hobby plan includes 50,000 credits monthly, five contributors, 10 concurrent CI connections, and community support.