[abritinthebay]

Different beasts. A direct comparison is unfair to either of them.

Uglify does minification and dead code removal. That's really it.

Closure does a lot of type checking, code rewriting, and has a very specific subset of JS that you'll have to use if you really want to get the best performance out of it... and does minification and dead code removal.

If you just want minification/dead code removal then Uglify is waaay faster, javascript native, and almost as small (105-120% of the size of Closure compressed code, depending on the code). It also doesn't use the JVM so that can make dep management/ops simpler if you don't already have java in your stack. YMMV.

If the advanced stuff sounds like something you'd want/need (if you have a large project and don't mind writing to the Closure optimizations) then Closure is certainly worth looking at. It's very good at what it does.

Choose the right tool for the job and all that.