I remember the first time I switched a project from CRA (which uses Webpack under the hood) to Vite. The dev server came up in under a second. I genuinely stared at the terminal for a moment, waiting for something else to happen. Nothing did. That was it — it was ready. That’s not a small improvement over Webpack. It’s a completely different experience.
What Is Vite? Vite (French for “fast”, pronounced “veet”) is a frontend build tool created by Evan You — the same person who built Vue.js [1]. It launched in 2020 and has been growing fast. As of 2025, Vite logs 53 million weekly npm downloads against Webpack’s 36 million [5]. Its GitHub stars tell the same story: 78,000 vs Webpack’s 66,000 [5].