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Introduction to ThumbmarkJS

What is ThumbmarkJS

ThumbmarkJS is the best and most popular free browser fingerprinting library. It can be used to generate a highly distinct digital fingerprint of the browser to identify users without cookies. This digital fingerprint stays the same even when cache is cleared, or if incognito is used.

The free, open source library is MIT-licensed. For drastically improved fingerprinting, you can use the API as well. There are free and paid options for the API.

ThumbmarkJS is already used by companies such as Google, Facebook and Cloudflare, and a total of over 60,000 sites monthly use ThumbmarkJS to identify their visitors. Each month more than 1 billion thumbmarks are created.

Relevant links:

Different types of implementations

You can use ThumbmarkJS in many ways, e.g. directly importing it in the browser using javascript, or by installing it into your node project.

ThumbmarkJS can be used without the backend, but for projects that require higher uniqueness of the thumbmarks, the API key is required.

The API key can be obtained from thumbmarkjs.com

For a simple import with javascript, check out this page

If you have a NextJS / React implementation, check this page instead

Uniqueness

The open source library has roughly 90% uniqueness in a sample of 1 million.

Using the API improves the uniqueness to 99%.

Mileage may vary though, and it depends on your audience.