Turbopack vs. Webpack: Is It Ready for Production? - By Sourav Mishra (@souravvmishra)

For a decade, Webpack has been the undisputed king of bundlers. But as our apps grew, so did our wait times. 30-second dev server starts became the norm.

Enter Turbopack. Written in Rust, it claims to be the successor to Webpack.

In this guide, I, Sourav Mishra, Co-founder of Codestam Technologies, put Turbopack to the test in Next.js 16 to see if it's ready for our enterprise projects.

The Benchmark

I converted a large enterprise Next.js application at Codestam Technologies (~500 routes) to use Turbopack. This wasn't a "Hello World" app—it included heavy libs like three.js, ag-grid, and framer-motion.

Similar to how the React 19 Compiler optimizes your code, Turbopack optimizes your workflow.

Is It Stable?

In Next.js 16, Vercel has marked Turbopack as Stable for Development.

This means you should absolutely use it for local work (next dev --turbo). It is significantly faster and crashes far less often than it did in Next.js 13/14.

The "Production" Catch

As of early 2026, next build still defaults to Webpack for production builds in most cases, though Turbopack is opt-in. The reason? The massive plugin ecosystem of Webpack (Sass, Less, obscure loaders) takes time to port to Rust.

When to Switch

• NOW: For local development. The DX improvement is undeniable.
• SOON: For production builds. Wait for widespread plugin support.

Conclusion

Turbopack is not just hype. It is the necessary evolution of our toolchain. If you haven't added --turbo to your dev script yet, you are wasting hours of your life every month waiting for compilation.

For more on optimizing your dev environment, check out my thoughts on Middleware Anti-Patterns.

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This guide was written by Sourav Mishra, Co-founder of Codestam Technologies and a Full Stack Engineer.