Choosing a JavaScript logging library: The 2026 definitive guide

With AI writing more and more of our code, properly monitoring and debugging that code has become an increasingly critical part of the development workflow that can’t be ignored. Luckily, we have more time than ever to implement the right tools to do so.

Implementing a production-ready logging solution is easy to do, and provides you and your LLM Agents with a wealth of debugging information from your app, across users and environments.

Why You Need a Logging Library

If you’re still using console.log for debugging, you might be wondering why you should bother with a logging library.

Key benefits include:

• High performance - Logging libraries are asynchronous, beating native console logging in performance.
• Structured Outputs - Output structured objects rather than strings, and simplify managing additional context and child loggers.
• Transports and Sinks - Send logs to one or more destinations, including the console, files, streams, and observability platforms.
• Filtering - Filter logs by severity, category, or other criteria to reduce noise. Redact sensitive data before it leaves your application.
• Integrations - Integrate with web frameworks, ORMs, and other libraries to automatically log context and errors with a consistent API across all layers of your application.
• Trace-connected logging - With Sentry, logs are automatically trace-connected to errors and other events, making it easier to debug and correlate issues.

Picking a Logging Library

Quick Selection Guide

• Pick Pino when you’re Node-only and care most about speed and a small bundle.
• Pick Winston when you want the most transports and configuration options and bundle size isn’t a concern.
• Pick Bunyan only if you’re maintaining an existing codebase that already uses it (not recommended for new projects).
• Pick LogTape when you need one logger for Node + browser/edge, or when writing a library that must work everywhere without forcing a choice on the app.

All of the libraries above support custom transports or sinks, so you can pipe logs to whatever backend you use. If you use Sentry for errors and performance, Sentry’s logging capabilities and integrations for Pino, Winston, Bunyan, and LogTape let you send logs into the same place as your issues and traces, so you can search and correlate without juggling multiple tools.

Pino

Best for: Node backends where speed and small bundle size matter.

GitHub: pinojs/pino · Docs: getpino.io · npm: pino

// Setup
const pino = require('pino');
const logger = pino({ name: 'user-service' });

// Usage
logger.info('Request received');

const child = logger.child({ userId: 'u-123', action: 'login' });
child.info('User action');

Pino was created in 2016 by Matteo Collina, creator of Fastify and member of the Node.js Technical Steering Committee. It’s one of the most popular and fastest JSON loggers for Node.js; it can run in the browser via a polyfill, but you lose most of the speed benefits there.

Key features:

• Reports to be ~2.5x faster than Winston
• Smallest bundle here (3.3 KB gzipped)
• Node.js only; browser via polyfill
• Pluggable transports and a wide ecosystem

Pino’s popularity grew quickly as it provided a huge leap in performance at a smaller size than the competition at the time, and it provides sensible defaults out of the box. Every log will automatically include a timestamp, pid, and level, along with any structured data you provide.

Winston

Best for: Node apps that need a rich ecosystem of transports and familiar, flexible configuration.

GitHub: winstonjs/winston · Docs: GitHub README · npm: winston

// Setup
const winston = require('winston');
const logger = winston.createLogger({
  level: 'info',
  format: winston.format.json(),
  defaultMeta: { service: 'user-service' },
  transports: [new winston.transports.Console()],
});

// Usage
logger.info('Request received');
logger.info({ userId: 'u-123', action: 'login' }, 'User action');

Winston was released in 2010 by Charlie Robbins, a former Node.js Foundation board member (now OpenJS Foundation). It’s the most popular and one of the oldest logging libraries for Node.js, with a large ecosystem and many built-in transports. The trade-off is it’s the largest bundle size (38.3 KB) and 17 dependencies in this comparison.

Key features:

• Many built-in transports (console, file, HTTP, and many community options) with flexible formatting
• Mature, well-documented, and widely used in production
• Not tree-shakeable; you pay for the full feature set in bundle size
• Node.js only
• No data redaction

To call Winston “legacy” would be a disservice, but it does follow an older design pattern that leads to a larger bundle size and more dependencies. Without question, Winston is your choice for mature, well-established Node.js applications that need a wide range of transports and flexible configuration right out of the box.

While all of the libraries mentioned in this list offer custom filtering capabilities, Winston does not explicitly support data redaction. Most loggers offer some form of redaction function that uses regex to replace private or sensitive data before it leaves your application.

Bunyan

Best for: Node services that want a simple, JSON-first API and minimal dependencies.

GitHub: trentm/node-bunyan · Docs: GitHub README · npm: bunyan

// Setup
const bunyan = require('bunyan');
const logger = bunyan.createLogger({ name: 'user-service' });

// Usage
logger.info('Request received');
logger.info({ userId: 'u-123', action: 'login' }, 'User action');

Bunyan was created by Trent Mick in 2012, making it one of the oldest libraries in this list. It’s a simple JSON-first logger with zero dependencies and a small bundle size.

Key features:

• Zero dependencies; small bundle (5.6 KB gzipped)
• Node.js only
• No data redaction

Some libraries are small and simple, and so don’t require updating often. That said, it’s been 5 years since the last release, and it doesn’t appear there has been much activity in the GitHub repository. At this time, I am not recommending Bunyan for new projects, though it remains one of the most popular libraries for Node.js.

Like Winston, Bunyan does not support data redaction.

LogTape

Best for: Modern TypeScript applications and libraries designed to run on Node, Deno, Bun, browsers, and edge.

GitHub: dahlia/logtape · Docs: logtape.org · npm: @logtape/logtape

// Setup
import { configure, getConsoleSink } from "@logtape/logtape";
await configure({
  sinks: { console: getConsoleSink() },
  loggers: [{ category: ["user-service"], lowestLevel: "info", sinks: ["console"] }],
});

// Usage
import { getLogger } from "@logtape/logtape";
const logger = getLogger(["user-service"]);
logger.info("Request received");
logger.info("User action", { userId: "u-123", action: "login" });

LogTape is the newest library here (2023) and the only one in this list that’s fully tree-shakable and runs natively on every major JavaScript runtime: Node, Deno, Bun, browsers, and edge. Their comparison page goes deep on how it stacks up against Pino, Winston, Bunyan, and others.

LogTape reports to be ~2x faster than Pino, and over 10x faster than Winston. Its cross-runtime compatibility comes with a slight increase in bundle size, making it the second smallest library in the list, only beaten by Pino.

Key features:

• Universal runtime: Perfect for full stack and serverless applications
• Zero dependencies and tree-shakable
• Hierarchical categories for organizing logs
• Native data redaction support