Choose an ID format for NYT user identifiers

A public Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) decision built with decisionpoint.io: 5 criteria, 4 alternatives, and 42 pairwise judgments.

Overall ranking

  1. UUID — 41.9%
  2. Nano ID — 24.9%
  3. Snowflake — 17.5%
  4. XID — 15.6%

Criteria weights

Overall consistency ratio: 0.05 (within the 0.1 acceptability threshold).

AI-generated summary

Generated by AI from this decision's data; may not reflect the latest judgments.

Results summary

UUID comes out with a decisive lead of 17.0 percentage points. It wins chiefly because the decision is dominated by distributed uniqueness, which accounts for 59.3% of the overall weight. UUID's strength on that criterion, contributing 26.0 percentage points to its final score, gives it a substantial edge of 7.6 percentage points over Nano ID. UUID also outperforms Nano ID meaningfully on developer UX, holding a 6.6 percentage point advantage. The decision hinges squarely on distributed uniqueness and developer experience, and UUID leads on both counts.

Check the sensitivity analysis to see whether the ranking holds if the weight on distributed uniqueness shifts.

Sensitivity summary

UUID holds a decisive lead of 17.0 percentage points over Nano ID. The top choice remains robust: all five criteria would need to shift substantially to alter the outcome. Specifically, UUID stays in first unless you dramatically increase the weight on Ordering (to about 43.0% from 5.6%) or on Database Support (to about 73.8% from 7.6%), either of which would hand the lead to Snowflake. These are both large moves, so UUID's position is secure unless your priorities around those two dimensions change radically.

Decision criteria

Alternatives

With JavaScript enabled, this page shows the full interactive decision: the hierarchy, every pairwise comparison on the Saaty 1–9 scale, consistency checking, the calculated priorities, and sensitivity analysis. New to the method? See What is the Analytic Hierarchy Process?