npm short for Node.js package manager, npm is the default package manager for Nodejs, npm is owned by Microsoft and hosts most of the node modules used. npm can be accessed through the command line or configured with a package.json file located at the root of the project. npm is often criticized for having large dependencies as each time you need a module npm install them in a node_modules file located in your project do modules linking to other modules this folder can grow to a few gigabytes fairly quickly. The best current alternative to Node.js is Yarn, but there are a number of other package managers that can be used with Node.js.