I had the same problem migrating from VS2013 recently.
As Josh noted in his comment here Visual Studio 2015 ships with an older version of Node. In case you don’t want to get stuck with whatever version of Node is built into Visual Studio, you can tell it to use the version you have already installed.
- Go to: Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions > External Web Tools
- Reorder so that
$(PATH)is above$(DevEnvDir)\Extensions\Microsoft\Web Tools\External
This also applies to other tools like Grunt, Bower and Gulp.
Found this solution by Mads Kristensen here.
For Visual Studio 2017, we can find the setting at
Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions > Web Package Management > External Web Tools