[ericgj]

I haven't tried bower, but I always get a little confused when it gets compared to component. Bower seems like a downloader with some 'dependency management'. But its 'dependencies' are disconnected from a module/build system. Great if you have a separate tool to do your build, but frankly most of them out there are awful, and it would be a nightmare even with the best to wire them up to all the conventions of all the libraries you pull in.

As Ian said, component's opinions encourage more modular, better code, and allow you to do what Web Components only now are promising within the DOM itself: bundle together templates, css, code, data, etc. And it does this without imposing a framework. For instance, if you have a pure javascript library, it is extremely easy to package for both component and NPM. Most of the UI components are framework-independent and that is encouraged. The component ecosystem and community is fantastic. And it's not sponsored by a corporation on the NYSE :) These were the main reasons I was attracted to component. The learning curve is a bit steep, but getting better all the time.