I used all four in real projects. One wrecked a monorepo at 3am. Another saved my ass in production. Here's the unfiltered truth about every major package manager in 2025.
The CI was green. The cache wasn't working. Forty minutes per build run because pnpm couldn't find the store in GitHub Actions. Here are the logs, the before/after YAML, and the exact configuration that brought it down to 8 minutes.
The install-time benchmark I published earlier didn't capture the real cost of pnpm workspaces in CI: silent cache invalidation, dependency hoisting that breaks in App Router, and a specific edge case that can take down your Railway pipeline. Here's what I failed to measure.
I ran all three package managers on the same Next.js 16 + strict TypeScript monorepo with Shadcn/ui and Radix UI. pnpm wins on disk and CI — but there's a real compatibility cost the migration guides never tell you about.
32 years in the dev trenches. Here I write what I learned, what I broke, and what nobody tells you in the tutorials.
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