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Nanoid Overview

Last Updated: 3/12/2026

Nanoid Overview

Nanoid is a tiny, secure, URL-friendly unique string ID generator for JavaScript. At just 118 bytes (minified and brotlied) with no dependencies, it’s one of the smallest ID generators available while maintaining strong security guarantees.

What Makes Nanoid Different

Smaller IDs: Nanoid uses a larger alphabet (A-Za-z0-9_-) than UUID, reducing ID size from 36 characters to 21 while maintaining similar collision probability.

Tiny Size: At 118 bytes, Nanoid is 4 times smaller than the uuid/v4 package (423 bytes).

Hardware Random: Uses the crypto module in Node.js and Web Crypto API in browsers for unpredictable, secure random generation.

URL-Safe: IDs use URL-friendly characters by default, so they work in URLs without encoding.

Quick Example

import { nanoid } from 'nanoid'
model.id = nanoid() //=> "V1StGXR8_Z5jdHi6B-myT"

Collision Probability

Nanoid has 126 random bits per ID (UUID v4 has 122). For there to be a one in a billion chance of duplication, 103 trillion IDs must be generated.

Who Should Use Nanoid

Nanoid is ideal for:

  • Web applications needing short, URL-safe IDs
  • Database primary keys where shorter IDs improve performance
  • Client-side ID generation without server round-trips
  • Projects where bundle size matters

What’s Next

Installation