Benchmark plural

plural benchmarks

In this benchmark we’ll look at two metrics : Library size and speed.

When doing the other benchmark in this repository I saw that what was taking most of the time wasn’t the parsing or rendering of messageformat but the different formatters and plurals generators.

I was curious about how different they were.

Libraries size

Sources can be found in src, measure taken on 19/07/2026 With latest available versions

Npm Package Version Size Comment
@onigoetz/intl-formatters 1.0.0-rc.3 2.8K Embeds the formatters in the runtime
@onigoetz/make-plural 1.0.0-rc.3 3.9K Contains only the formatter for en in this example, have to be shipped separately.
make-plural 8.1.0 17.1K Contains all locales
@phensley/plurals 1.14.0 34.6K Contains all locales

Benchmarks run on

  • Node.js v24.11.1
  • Apple M2 CPU
  • July 19, 2026

Ordinal

const input = [`ordinal`, `en`, 2];

// Renders: `two`
Name ops/sec MoE Runs sampled
make-plural 16,589,143 ± 0.81% 95
@onigoetz/make-plural(memo) 12,813,989 ± 1.21% 94
@phensley/plurals 12,256,778 ± 0.75% 93
@onigoetz/intl 2,163,325 ± 1.99% 93
@onigoetz/make-plural 53,348 ± 1.10% 95

Choosing a library for your use case

  • If you know which languages you need in advance: @phensley/plurals and make-plural both ship a pre-compiled and pre-optimized set of rules for plurals. They’re the fastest options and will be the smallest if your build system can perform Tree Shaking.
  • If you do not know the languages in advance.
    • And speed is a concern: @onigoetz/make-plural and its memoized alternative @onigoetz/make-plural(memo) should do the trick. you will need to ship the pluralization rules one way or another to the function.
    • And speed is not a concern: @onigoetz/intl uses Intl.PluralRules that ships with most browsers and Node.js runtimes but as you can see it’s much slower than other solutions.