Bower is fantastic for dependency management. This is apparent as soon as you use it to manage the reqs for your project, but becomes even more awesome when you start publishing your own code, even if it's something not many other people use. Right now I have a bootstrap like Sass framework that I built and use between five or six projects. Not too big, but each one of those projects is pretty popular and actively edited. I needed a way to make sure everything updated well and could be temporarily stalled while I worked on better releases. Bower does all that.

Grunt is just my workhorse. Bower may install my files, but I need them moved around into certain folders in my project. Grunt handles that with a line or two. I also use it to watch my sass files and rebuild my static sites when changes to the templates or JS files occur. Since I publish some of my code to github I have grunt commands to auto tag and version my git repo and build, merge and publish a gh-pages branch so my documentation is kept up to speed. It also minifies whatever files I need minified/uglified and adds some license and documentation to the top of the files.

Almost all of these things I used to do manually or hand separate processes for.