esbuild tends to produce larger bundles due to https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/639. Looks like there was recent activity though, so we need to re-test. Anyway, there's a plugin available for now: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@parcel/optimizer-esbuild. We're also excited about the SWC minifier project, which is basically a port of Terser to Rust.

This link https://github.com/privatenumber/minification-benchmarks shows swc is still a work in progress.