Compare package managers

Benchs from pnpm and yarn 3+ already exists. Let's test the differences based on nextjs-monorepo-example for fun with GH CI first approach (ubuntu).

Potential for co2 emissions reductions at install, build and runtime (♻️🌳❤️) ?

See also 2 interesting gists to help you set up caches on github

• yarn 4 - https://gist.github.com/belgattitude/042f9caf10d029badbde6cf9d43e400a
• pnpm 8 - https://gist.github.com/belgattitude/838b2eba30c324f1f0033a797bab2e31

📥 Install speed

Measured through github actions. See workflows/ci-install-benchmark.yml and latest run

• PNPM 8.5.1 - 25s (16s + 9s for cache fetch / decompress), see .npmrc
• Yarn 4.0.0-rc.44 / nmLinker - 28s (26s+2s with compressionLevel:0), see .yarnrc.no-compress.yml
• Yarn 4.0.0-rc.44 / nmLinker - 37s (34s+3s with compressionLevel:mixed), see .yarnrc.mixed-compress.yml

With cache

CI Scenario	Install	CI fetch cache	Total	Cache size	CI persist cache
yarn4 mixed-compression	34s	3s	37s	201Mb	(±5s)
yarn4 no compression	26s	2s	28s	155Mb	(±8s)
pnpm8.5.1	16s	9s	25s	253Mb	(±30s)

Without cache

CI Scenario	Install	Diff with cached run
yarn4 mixed-compression / no cache	±83s	> 2x slower
yarn4 no compression / no cache	±45s	< 2x slower
pnpm8 / no cache	±48s	2x slower

Globally very close to each other when considering that yarn preserve cache across lock changes.

Caution PNPM does not have an equivalent of supportedArchitectures. In other words docker, vercel, cache sizes are bigger when using native binaries (swc,esbuild...). In lambdas it can lead to slow startup times too.

See the action in .github/workflows/ci-install-benchmark.yml and the history log.

👬🏽 Dedupe check speed

Recent PNPM has a built-in dedupe like yarn. Dedupe checks are life-savers, what's the time ?

• yarn: instant
• pnpm: need to reinstall (+/- install time)

⏩ Nextjs build speed and lambda size

Build the nextjs-app standalone mode: Yarn / Pnpm are equivalent (+/- 1min). Curious ? See the action in .github/workflows/ci-build-benchmark.yml and the history log

On the pnpm side, it's more complex cause

• In many cases you'll have to run install with auto-install-peers=true or in hoisted mode to circumvent issues with some libraries. When doing this, expect rather slow installs (ie prisma without hacks, ...).
• Nextjs standalone mode often breaks with pnpm
• As pnpm/npm does not yet support supportedArchitectures, expect bigger lambda size (slow cold start). Nextjs/prisma tries to clean that up, but yarn does a better job (no more prisma binaries for glibc + musl, etc)

See the section "Debug size" in .github/workflows/ci-build-benchmark.yml and the history log

🔢 Install size (in monorepo)

If you're not using nextjs (with standalone mode) things are different. Yarn does a better job at deduping and also avoid installing native binaries (ie: glibc, musl) thx to supportedArchitectures. See also: pnpm/pnpm#5504.

🦺 Safe to use ?

They differ in the hoisting structure and the peer-dependency strategy. Expect different kind of edge cases. In my experience pnpm is sometimes harder to work with (ie prisma)

Technicalities

• Yarn 4.0.0-rc.44 - "Safe, stable, reproducible projects".
• Pnpm 8.6.0 - "Fast, disk space efficient package manager".

Yarn support 3 module resolution algorithms (often called hoisting): node_modules, pnp and pnpm (alpha). Only the nodeLinker: node-modules have been included in this test to prevent any compatibility issues. Keep in mind that the pnp linker will be the fastest in install and will even bring speedups at runtime.

Pnpm is a fast moving package manager recently endorsed by vercel that plays well in monorepos.

Aspects

• Reproducible ?

  • Yarn lightweight js binary is committed within the repo (<3mb). That avoid bugs due to difference in versions. PNPM is too big to be stored in the repo, you need to install it. The experimental corepack will bring solution to this. Both package managers already support corepack, but there's some time before a stable ecosystem shift.
  • Yarn is very picky about strictness, checksums... it's quite difficult to abuse. Something that is generally preferred in the enterprise world.

• Fast ?

  • On CI what makes the biggest different is to set up a cache. Simple and easy. See pnpm cache gist and yarn cache gist, that gives a >2x boost.
  • It's super difficult to compare this. I would say in simple scenarios or whenever you deal with many versions of the same dep: PNPM rules. In monorepos with a couple of 'native' deps (ie: prisma, swc, esbuild...) Yarn should be faster.

• Space efficient ?

  • PNPM helps when many versions of the same library co-exists (ie: lodash...). It only stores the files that differs (creates a symlink instead). It might help in those situations (a symlink is 4kb so it gives best results if non-changed files are more than 4kb). So useful is some specific scenarios. In measurements yarn seems to use less space.
  • PNPM handles peer-deps differently. In some aspects it's more solid than yarn with node_modules but it does not dedupe them (leading to more versions installed).
  • Yarn offers supportedArchitectures. When configured to current, it helps to not download native binaries for other platforms (ie: amd64 + musl for esbuild, swc...)

Scenarios

The following have been tested on CI. Look for the results in the action history:

See results in actions

Want to test locally ?

Use hyperfine and taskset to mimic ci two-cores speed.

Compare pnpm / yarn

Warning this is native speed with cache, but it does not take into account the cache persistence on a CI.

Yarn has a much lower overhead on @action/cache than pnpm

• fetch/persist - less and smaller files to compress:
  • yarn cache = 2.234 zip files (mixed compression = 227Mb, no compress = 769Mb)
  • pnpm store = 62.958 files/links (1.1Gb)
• it won't grow overtime (lock changes affects only a bit). automatically pruned
• with pnpm there's a lot of chances to reach your cache max budget (more keys on main) in other words: cost/benefit balance (refer to ci measurements).

Also note that pnpm even with cache will still download some archives (nextjs, turbo,...) and seems to be more sensitive to npm outages.

On CI yarn compress:off will be faster, I tested on high end i7 with 2 cores but the zip compression overhead exists on lower end machines

Command	Mean [s]	Min [s]	Max [s]	Relative
yarn cache:on yarn compress:mixed	21.300 ± 0.169	21.173	21.492	1.99 ± 0.03
yarn cache:on yarn compress:off	22.759 ± 0.115	22.630	22.851	2.12 ± 0.03
pnpm cache:on	10.712 ± 0.126	10.611	10.853	1.00

# npx -y rimraf@5.0.1 --glob '**/node_modules' .yarn/tmp .pnpm

taskset -c 0,1 hyperfine --runs=3 --export-markdown "docs/bench-pm-with-cache-no-nm.md" --show-output \
\
--command-name "yarn cache:on yarn compress:mixed" \
--prepare "export YARN_CACHE_FOLDER=.yarn/tmp/compress/.cache YARN_COMPRESSION_LEVEL=mixed YARN_LOCKFILE_FILENAME=yarn.mixed-compress.lock YARN_INSTALL_STATE_PATH=.yarn/tmp/compress/install-state.gz && yarn install --immutable && npx -y rimraf@5.0.1 --glob '**/node_modules' .yarn/tmp/compress/install-state.gz" \
"yarn install --immutable" \
\
--command-name "yarn cache:on yarn compress:off" \
--prepare "export YARN_CACHE_FOLDER=.yarn/tmp/no-compress/.cache YARN_COMPRESSION_LEVEL=0 YARN_LOCKFILE_FILENAME=yarn.no-compress.lock YARN_INSTALL_STATE_PATH=.yarn/tmp/no-compress/install-state.gz && yarn install --immutable && npx -y rimraf@5.0.1 --glob '**/node_modules' .yarn/tmp/no-compress/install-state.gz" \
"yarn install --immutable" \
\
--command-name "pnpm cache:on" \
--prepare "npx -y rimraf@5.0.1 --glob '**/node_modules' .pnpm  && pnpm install --virtual-store-dir .pnpm/virtual --store-dir .pnpm/global --frozen-lockfile --prefer-offline && npx -y rimraf@5.0.1 --glob '**/node_modules' .pnpm/virtual" \
"pnpm install --virtual-store-dir .pnpm/virtual --store-dir .pnpm/global --frozen-lockfile --prefer-offline"

# npx -y rimraf@5.0.1 --glob '**/node_modules' .pnpm  .yarn/tmp

Compare yarn options

Command	Mean [s]	Min [s]	Max [s]	Relative
yarnCache:on - installState:on - nm:off	21.350 ± 0.216	21.185	21.595	5.59 ± 0.24
yarnCache:on - installState:off - nm:off	22.717 ± 0.225	22.510	22.957	5.95 ± 0.25
yarnCache:on - installState:off - nm:on	11.676 ± 0.041	11.647	11.722	3.06 ± 0.13
yarnCache:on - installState:on - nm:on	3.820 ± 0.156	3.645	3.946	1.00

export YARN_CACHE_FOLDER=.yarn/benchmark/cache YARN_COMPRESSION_LEVEL=0 YARN_LOCKFILE_FILENAME=yarn.no-compress.lock;

YARN_INSTALL_STATE_PATH=.yarn/benchmark/install-state.gz yarn install --immutable;

taskset -c 0,1 hyperfine --runs=3 --export-markdown "docs/yarn-bench-various-params.md" \
--command-name "yarnCache:on - installState:on - nm:off" \
--prepare "npx -y rimraf@5.0.1 --glob '**/node_modules'" \
"YARN_INSTALL_STATE_PATH=.yarn/benchmark/install-state.gz yarn install --immutable" \
--command-name "yarnCache:on - installState:off - nm:off" \
--prepare "npx -y rimraf@5.0.1 --glob '**/node_modules' '.yarn/benchmark/install-state.off.gz'" \
"YARN_INSTALL_STATE_PATH=.yarn/benchmark/install-state.off.gz yarn install --immutable" \
--command-name "yarnCache:on - installState:off - nm:on" \
--prepare "npx -y rimraf@5.0.1 --glob '.yarn/benchmark/install-state.off.gz'" \
"YARN_INSTALL_STATE_PATH=.yarn/benchmark/install-state.off.gz yarn install --immutable" \
--command-name "yarnCache:on - installState:on - nm:on" \
--prepare "echo 'all caches'" \
"YARN_INSTALL_STATE_PATH=.yarn/benchmark/install-state.gz yarn install --immutable" \
--show-output

Summary
  'yarnCache:on - installState:on - nm:on' ran
    3.06 ± 0.13 times faster than 'yarnCache:on - installState:off - nm:off'
    5.59 ± 0.24 times faster than 'yarnCache:on - installState:on - nm:off'
    5.95 ± 0.25 times faster than 'yarnCache:on - installState:off - nm:off'

Running scripts

export YARN_COMPRESSION_LEVEL=mixed YARN_LOCKFILE_FILENAME=yarn.mixed-compress.lock 
pnpm i --frozen-lockfile 
yarn install --immutable
hyperfine --show-output --runs=20 --export-markdown "docs/calling-npm-script.md" \
"pnpm run echo" \
"yarn run echo" \
"npm run echo"

Command	Mean [ms]	Min [ms]	Max [ms]	Relative
pnpm run echo	444.5 ± 19.4	431.0	478.6	1.47 ± 0.06
yarn run echo	770.2 ± 5.8	765.5	779.9	2.54 ± 0.02
npm run echo	303.4 ± 1.2	302.2	304.9	1.00

Changelog

Sponsors ❤️

If you are enjoying some this guide in your company, I'd really appreciate a sponsorship, a coffee or a dropped star. That gives me some more time to improve it to the next level.