Why marker?

chalk is great. marker builds on what chalk proved — chainable API, terminal detection, dual CJS/ESM — and then makes it faster and leaner for the cases that matter most.

Where marker wins

5-level chains

Deep chains are common in real CLI tools: marker.bgBlue.white.bold.underline('text'). chalk creates a new builder object on each . accessor; marker caches every unique chain globally.

chalk  5-chain     56 ns
marker 5-chain     33 ns   1.70× faster

Dynamic colors (hex, rgb)

Parsing a hex string and building an ANSI escape is non-trivial. marker optimizes the hot path with direct V8-native string ops.

chalk  .hex()     292 ns
marker .hex()     232 ns   1.26× faster

chalk  .rgb()     197 ns
marker .rgb()     169 ns   1.16× faster

Tagged templates — no extra package

chalk requires chalk-template as a separate package for chalk`...` syntax. marker includes it out of the box.

Where chalk wins

marker is not universally faster. Short single-style strings (chalk.red('x')) are roughly tied. Three-level chains slightly favor chalk. See the full benchmarks page.

Intentional differences

marker is not a drop-in replacement:

chalk	marker	reason
chalk('a', 'b') joins with space	No multi-arg — use template literals	Removes a check from every call
new Chalk({ level })	withLevel(level)	Cleaner factory, no class
Tagged templates via chalk-template	Built-in	One fewer dependency

See Differences from chalk for the full list.