This study aimed to evaluate the potential of the recently introduced Prophet model for estimating reference evapotranspiration (ETo). A comparative study was conducted for benchmarking the model results with support vector regression (SVR) and temperature-based empirical models (Thornthwaite and Hargreaves) in southern Japan. The performance of the Prophet, SVR and temperature-based empirical models was evaluated by Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) and coefficient of determination (R2). The results indicate that temperature-based Prophet and SVR models have greater accuracy than the empirical models. The Prophet model with sole input of relative humidity, sunshine hours or windspeed showed acceptable accuracy (NSE > 0.80; R2 > 0.80), while SVR models with similar inputs showed greater errors. Accuracy improved with increasing number of input parameters, giving excellent performance (NSE > 0.95; R2 > 0.95) with all input parameters. Hence, the Prophet model is a new promising approach for modelling ETo with limited input variables.