Lerna vs Turborepo

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.

Turborepo is a build system for JavaScript and TypeScript codebases, including monorepos and single-package workspaces. It organizes tasks into a graph and runs them in parallel across available cores. Task outputs and logs can be cached locally, while Remote Caching allows cache artifacts to be shared across machines. Vercel Remote Cache is free on all Vercel plans, including for teams that do not host applications on Vercel; teams can also self-host a remote cache using an HTTP server that implements the Remote Caching API. Remote artifacts can be signed with HMAC-SHA256 and checked when downloaded. The CLI is generally supported on Debian-based Linux, macOS, and Windows for x86_64 and ARM64. Stable package-manager support includes pnpm 8+, npm 8+, Yarn 1+ including Plug’n’Play, and Bun 1.2+. CI guides cover Vercel, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, GitLab CI, Travis CI, and Buildkite. Turborepo is free. To cache task files, outputs must be declared in configuration. Individuals can seek free help in GitHub Discussions or Vercel Community; companies can contact Vercel about paid support.