Vite

Vite is the default dev server and build tool for modern JavaScript. Save a file and the browser updates almost instantly, because during development Vite serves your source as native ES modules instead of bundling everything first. Starter templates cover React, Vue, Svelte, Solid and plain JavaScript. MIT licensed, free.

Setup is one command: npm create vite@latest. Vite 8 (March 2026) replaced its old split of esbuild for dev and Rollup for production with Rolldown, a single Rust bundler the team says runs 10-30x faster than Rollup, and most existing plugins work unchanged.

There is no paid tier. VoidZero, the company Evan You (the Vue creator) started around Vite, joined Cloudflare in June 2026, and Vite stays MIT and vendor-neutral. Vite+, their all-in-one toolchain for testing, linting, formatting and builds, shipped 1.0 in September as free MIT software. Solo, small teams, larger teams: free.

The catch is the dev server. Vite published four security advisories in October 2026 alone, mostly ways to read files outside your project, and the serious ones hit when you expose the dev server to the network with --host. Stay patched and keep it off the open internet.