npmpulse

dayjs vs date-fns downloads

dayjs took 937M downloads in the last 90 days against date-fns's 1.3B — 71% of it. date-fns leads over the last twelve months, on 3.5B. The lead last changed hands in Oct 2024, when date-fns overtook dayjs. npm's record for dayjs begins on 2018-04-10, and for date-fns on 2015-02-27.

dayjs against date-fns
 dayjsdate-fns
Last 90 days937M1.3B
Last 12 months2.4B3.5B
All time6.3B8.5B
Record begins2018-04-102015-02-27
Last 12 months vs the 12 before1.98×2.40×

Granularity

Scale

Range

Custom range

Mar 2015 → Sep 2026

PackageTotalLatestPeak

dayjs

6.2B

341M

341M

date-fns

8.3B

470M

470M

101 monthly periods

Monthly downloads for both, each line starting where that package's own record does.

dayjs downloads · date-fns downloads · open both in the interactive chart

Also compared

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Both series, redrawn from npm's figures whenever the image is fetched, so the comparison stays current on its own.

<img src="https://npmpulse.com/api/svg?q=dayjs,date-fns&range=5y&granularity=monthly" alt="dayjs compared with date-fns npm downloads" />

Where these numbers come from

Download counts are npm's own, published through its downloads API. They count installs rather than people, so they include CI, mirrors and repeated installs, and a package pulled in as a dependency counts for that package too.

npm's API returns at most 549 days for a single package and 365 when several are compared, and truncates an over-long range rather than refusing it. npmpulse asks for the whole span in 365-day chunks and stitches the answers together, which is what makes a chart that starts in 2015 possible at all.

npm reports 0 for every package from 2015-01-10 until 2015-02-27, when its real records begin; those leading zeros are trimmed rather than charted. Individual days it lost entirely are interpolated, and the most recent day or two, which it has not finalised, is dropped. The monthly figures here are complete calendar months, so a package that started mid-month begins with the following one.

A handful of months are inflated in npm's own figures. svelte's 2022-11-23 records 5.0M downloads against a norm nearer 80K, and November 2022 is a spike in several packages at once; they are left alone here, because they are what the source says, but a one-month jump is treated as a spike rather than as a change of fortune. That is why the comparisons below only call a lead change a lead change when it held for a second month.

A package's record can also begin before the package did: npm names get reused. Where a first day is a handful of downloads, that is what you are looking at — the earlier life of the name rather than a slow launch. Where it is hundreds of thousands, the opposite is true, and what is missing is upstream history rather than usage.

Snapshot of 2026-10-13. Figures run through 2026-10-11.