No, I was comparing ninja to make -j8. If you have large recursive makefiles they end up waiting for each sub-target to be made before the next directory is entered and made. This has a significant effect when compiling our ~100k line code base. Maybe 30% slower on average.

Ninja does this by default but additionally has a much lower overhead on incremental rebuilds.

you can also set MAKEFLAGS=" -j $(nproc)" and keep using `make` as your would normally