Wednesday, 18 March 2026

npm and pnpm - the differences

npm, the Node package manager, can be incredibly disk-inefficient. pnpm was created to be (literally) a "performant npm" sometimes also called "painless npm".

The difference lies in each others' ability to store packages. 

npm duplicates node_modules per project, resulting in a huge disk footprint, whereas pnpm uses a global store and stores links to the same, resulting in 70-90% space savings.

node_modules is a directory in a NodeJS project storing third-party libraries and dependencies.

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