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Container transportation is an important mode of international trade logistics in the world today, and its changes will seriously affect the development of the international market. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has added a huge drag to global container logistics. Therefore, the accurate forecasting of container throughput can make a significant contribution to stakeholders who want to develop more accurate operational strategies and reduce costs. However, the current research on port container throughput forecasting mainly focuses on proposing more innovative forecasting methods on a single time series, but lacks the comparison of the performance of different basic models in the same time series and different time series. This study uses nine methods to forecast the historical throughput of the world's top 20 container ports and compares the results within and between methods. The main findings of this study are as follows. First, GRU is a method that can produce more accurate results (0.54–2.27 MAPE and 7.62–112.48 RMSE) with higher probability (85% for MAPE and 75% for RMSE) when constructing container throughput forecasting models. Secondly, NM can be used for rapid and simple container throughput estimation when computing equipment and services are not available. Thirdly, the average accuracy of machine learning forecasting methods is higher than that of traditional methods, but the accuracy of individual machine learning forecasting methods may not be higher than that of the best conventional traditional methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]