I tried switching to fuse-box from browserify. It was a bit faster than straight browserify, but not faster than browserify with persistify. My bundles were taking between 350-650 ms with 21 files adding up to 230k - not a large project by any means.
Ultimately I had to switch back to browserify because I do two different builds, one for dev with sourcemaps, and one for production without sourcemaps. The .fusebox cache was getting screwed up when I switched builds, causing runtime failures because modules were missing. I could remove the cache every time I start a watch or a build, but it takes 3.5 seconds to build from an empty cache, which is crazy slow.