Unique Identifiers: UUID vs NanoID
I think every developer used unique identifiers at least once in their life. You can use those to generate a primary key in a database, a unique filename, etc.
In this article, I'll compare the popular UUID with the rising start NanoID.
UUID
This is one of the most popular libraries to generate unique identifiers right now.
- It's small in size (483 bytes)
- 11.6k starts on Github and over 59 million weekly downloads on NPM
- It has zero dependencies
- Supports for CommonJS, ECMAScript Modules and CDN builds
- Supports for all major browsers (including IE 11 😅)
- It's secure and well documented
Quickstart
Install
npm install uuid
Generate UUID
ES6 syntax
import { v4 as uuidv4 } from 'uuid';
uuidv4();
CommonJS syntax
const { v4: uuidv4 } = require('uuid');
uuidv4();
NanoID
NanoID is a tiny, secure, URL-friendly, unique string ID generator for JavaScript.
It's not as popular as UUID but it has grown very fast in the last period and looks very promising. It has 14.5k starts on Github right now (more than UUID).
- Very small in size (130 bytes - minified and gzipped)
- No dependencies
- 2 times faster than UUID
- Safe (it uses a hardware random generator)
- Shorter IDs (21 symbols) than UUID (because it uses a larger alphabet)
- Available in 19 programming languages
- Supports modern browsers, Node.js and React Native
Quickstart
Install
npm i nanoid
Generate NanoID
import { nanoid } from 'nanoid'
cosnt id = nanoid()
Conclusion
I've recently started using NanoID in my projects and it's working very well. I like the fact that the strings are shorter.
If you want to reach me, check out my twitter.
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