What’s the difference between Gulp and Grunt? While Gulp is a later entry to the field, it has gained popularity for crisp performance and elegant syntax. Unlike Grunt, which tends to read and write files to disk, Gulp uses a stream (Vinyl) object to pipe method results to following methods, allowing calls to be chained together in a fluent syntax. Grunt is an earlier entry in the client-build-tool space. Grunt modules predefine most everyday tasks like linting, minimizing, and unit testing, and Grunt is widely adopted and downloaded thousands of times each day.