I've tried gulp and didn't like at all. Very confusing and things did not work well. I probably didn't use it right, but I couldn't find clear paths to do the stuff I wanted. Everything had a lot of possible ways to achieve, some worked, some did not.
Webpack was a breeze for me. The documentation was more clear and things worked well with less hassle. It also features webpack-devserver that have hot update capabilities.
I have a boilerplate react project if you wanna take a look: