Comparing
Modern JavaScript date utility library
RFC9562 UUIDs
| Metric | date-fns | uuid |
|---|---|---|
| Ecosystem | npm | npm |
| Difficulty | Intermediate | Intermediate |
| Weekly downloads | 71.4M | 242.6M↑ |
| Latest version | v4.1.0 | v13.0.0 |
| Recipes | 2 | 7↑ |
date-fns only
Shared
uuid only
Use date-fns for formatting, parsing, arithmetic (add/subtract days, months, years), comparison, and locale-aware output in any JavaScript environment. Import only what you need and the bundle impact is minimal.
Use uuid whenever you need a unique ID that doesn't require a database sequence: primary keys in distributed systems, idempotency keys for API calls, session tokens, file names, or correlation IDs for logging.
date-fns v2 has limited first-party timezone support — for complex timezone-aware applications use Luxon or the Temporal polyfill. The function-heavy API can feel verbose for simple one-liners; Day.js's method chaining is more readable in those cases.
For database primary keys where you control the DB, auto-incrementing integers are smaller and faster to index. For sortable unique IDs (e.g. for pagination), consider ULID or UUIDv7, which encode a timestamp prefix.
date-fns
uuid
+3 more