BrowserSync vs Rails Spring: What are the differences?

BrowserSync: Reload all your browsers, every time you hit save. BrowserSync makes your tweaking and testing faster by synchronising file changes and interactions across multiple devices. It’s wicked-fast and totally free; Rails Spring: Rails application preloader. Spring is a Rails application preloader. It speeds up development by keeping your application running in the background so you don't need to boot it every time you run a test, rake task or migration.

BrowserSync belongs to "Live Reloading" category of the tech stack, while Rails Spring can be primarily classified under "Rails Testing".

Some of the features offered by BrowserSync are:

• Interaction sync
• File sync
• URL history

On the other hand, Rails Spring provides the following key features:

• Totally automatic
• no need to explicitly start and stop the background process
• Reloads your application code on each run

BrowserSync and Rails Spring are both open source tools. BrowserSync with 11.4K GitHub stars and 749 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Rails Spring with 2.66K GitHub stars and 308 GitHub forks.

Secret Escapes, Kong, and Zenfulfillment are some of the popular companies that use BrowserSync, whereas Rails Spring is used by Referral SaaSquatch, 5miles, and Durham AV Group. BrowserSync has a broader approval, being mentioned in 17 company stacks & 97 developers stacks; compared to Rails Spring, which is listed in 8 company stacks and 22 developer stacks.