Turborepo
High-performance build system for JavaScript and TypeScript monorepos
About Turborepo
Turborepo is a high-performance build system for JavaScript and TypeScript monorepos. Built by Vercel, it makes managing multiple packages and applications in a single repository fast and maintainable. Its core innovation is intelligent caching: Turborepo hashes your source files and build configurations, then caches the output so that unchanged packages are never rebuilt. Remote caching through Vercel lets your entire team share build caches, meaning a build one developer runs locally benefits everyone else. Turborepo understands your dependency graph and runs tasks in the optimal parallel order while respecting dependencies between packages. A simple turbo.json configuration file defines your pipeline of build, test, lint, and deploy tasks across all packages. It supports incremental builds, task filtering to run commands on specific packages, and watch mode for development. Turborepo works with any package manager (npm, pnpm, yarn) and integrates seamlessly with existing monorepo setups. Compared to Nx, Turborepo is simpler and more focused, doing one thing well: making your monorepo builds as fast as possible. For teams maintaining multiple packages, shared libraries, or micro-frontends, Turborepo eliminates the pain of slow CI/CD pipelines and redundant builds.
Key Features
- Incremental builds with intelligent caching
- Remote caching for sharing build artifacts across teams
- Parallel task execution
- Pipeline configuration for task dependencies
- Pruned subsets for Docker deployments
- Support for npm, yarn, and pnpm workspaces
- Vercel integration for seamless deployment
Pros & Cons
What we like
- Dramatically speeds up monorepo builds
- Easy to adopt incrementally in existing repos
- Remote caching saves CI minutes significantly
- Simple configuration compared to alternatives
- Backed and maintained by Vercel
Room for improvement
- Focused on JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystems
- Remote caching requires Vercel or self-hosted setup
- Less flexible than Nx for non-JS projects
- Configuration can be confusing for complex pipelines

