A Quick Comparison of Mainstream Node.js Package Managers: pnpm vs bun vs npm vs yarn

Frontend

I've been working on frontend projects a lot recently, and I switched my environment from the original Node.js to bun, which gave me an incredibly fast experience.

When I needed to maintain the StarBlog Vue Admin project today, I had to install dependencies again. This gave me a sudden idea—I wanted to compare the disk space usage of different package managers, which led to the tests in this article.

This article focuses on testing the disk space usage of node_modules.

Testing Environment

• Operating System: Windows10 22H2 10.0.19045

• Test Project: StarBlog Vue Admin

• Node.js Environment: v20.18.1

This is a Vue2-based admin project, which can be a good representation of some legacy frontend projects.

The analysis space command used is:

"{0:N2} MB" -f ((Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Force .\node_modules | Measure-Object -Property Length -Sum).Sum / 1MB)

Test Results

The test results surprised me a bit. npm, once frowned upon by many, has improved so much—it's now quite competitive in both speed and space usage 👍. I guess I haven't used npm in ages 😂 (Well well, how the tables have turned 😄).

PS: By the way, pnpm dev couldn't start the project properly here, throwing a bunch of errors. I suspect it's a version incompatibility issue—downgrading the Node.js version might solve it, but I can't be bothered to tinker with it. 🥱

Summary

• pnpm's "hard links + global store" mechanism is indeed the strongest in terms of space usage, as expected.
• npm / yarn show little difference for single projects, with similar disk space performance.
• bun is usually faster, but in this test, it actually consumes the most disk space — which also shows that its current optimization for "deduplication/space optimization" is not as good as pnpm, or even npm.

Analysis

Impact of Project Dependency Structure

• Vue2 projects have relatively fixed dependencies, and the package size does not tend to be as large as the combination of Vue3 + Vite, which often involves hundreds or even thousands of small packages.
• In this case, npm's redundancy issue is not significant, so its space usage is not much different from yarn / pnpm / bun (around 200 MB, all on the same order of magnitude).
• The hard-link optimization of pnpm only creates a larger gap in "scenarios with high dependency duplication" (e.g., monorepos, multiple projects reusing dependencies). For a single project, its advantages are "diminished."

Improvements in Node.js 20

• Starting from Node.js 16, the default version of npm has been npm 8+ / 9+, which has significantly improved both performance and disk efficiency.
• Previously, people criticized npm for being slow and taking up too much space—that was the experience during the npm 6/7 era. Now, npm doesn't actually "lag behind" at all in single-project scenarios.
• This is why I feel that "npm isn't as slow as it's rumored to be, and it doesn't take up too much space either."

Installation Speed vs. Disk Space Usage

• bun: Its absolute advantage lies in installation speed, but its space optimization mechanism is not as good as pnpm, leading to the highest disk usage.
• pnpm: Fast installation and saves space, but the advantage isn't significant for a "single project"; its full potential is realized when dependencies are shared across multiple projects.
• npm: With optimizations in Node.js 20, its speed is no longer considered slow. Disk space usage has also been optimized, putting it on par with yarn.
• yarn (classic): Compared to npm, it no longer has a major advantage. Nowadays, more people are switching to yarn berry (v2+), but that setup may have compatibility concerns with older Vue2 projects.

Conclusion

• Single-project scenarios: npm/yarn/pnpm/bun have minimal differences; any choice will suffice.
• Multi-project / monorepo scenarios: pnpm's space advantage becomes dramatically amplified, while npm/yarn/bun will gradually bloat.
• Extreme speed requirements: bun is the fastest, but the trade-off is higher resource usage.