Biome vs ESLint
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
Free and open source
Open sourceFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
MIT
MIT
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Biome / OSS community · since 2023
Category standard
OpenJS Foundation · since 2013
Strengths
- Dramatically faster than ESLint plus Prettier, which matters on pre-commit hooks.
- One binary and one config replaces two toolchains.
- Very good ESLint rule migration tooling.
- The plugin ecosystem lets you enforce almost any convention as a rule.
- Autofix handles a large share of findings without human effort.
- Universal — every JavaScript tool integrates with it.
Limitations
- Rule coverage does not yet match ESLint's plugin ecosystem.
- No support for framework-specific plugin ecosystems at ESLint's depth.
- Young project, so expect churn.
- Configuration is a real project of its own, and the flat-config migration caused significant churn.
- Slow on large codebases without caching.
- Rule sprawl produces bikeshedding unless someone owns the config.
Best for
New JavaScript projects and teams frustrated by lint performance.
Every JavaScript and TypeScript project.
All of these integrate with: VS Code, GitHub Actions.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.