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Fastify vs Express comparison

Compare fastify vs express for backend use cases, including package popularity, downloads, ecosystem fit, and practical tradeoffs.

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<a href="https://expressjs.com/"> <picture> <source media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)" srcset="https://expressjs.com/images/logos/logo-express-white.svg"> <img alt="Express Logo" src="https://expressjs.com/images/logos/logo-express-black.svg" width="280"> </picture> </a>

Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Node.js.

Table of contents

  • Installation
  • Features
  • Docs & Community
  • Quick Start
  • Philosophy
  • Examples
  • Contributing
    • Security Issues
    • Running Tests
  • Current project team members
    • TC (Technical Committee)
      • TC emeriti members
    • Triagers
      • Emeritus Triagers
  • License

NPM Version NPM Downloads Linux Build Test Coverage OpenSSF Scorecard Badge

import express from 'express' const app = express() app.get('/', (req, res) => { res.send('Hello World') }) app.listen(3000, () => { console.log('Server is running on http://localhost:3000') })

Installation

This is a Node.js module available through the npm registry.

Before installing, download and install Node.js. Node.js 18 or higher is required.

If this is a brand new project, make sure to create a package.json first with the npm init command.

Installation is done using the npm install command:

npm install express

Follow our installing guide for more information.

Features

  • Robust routing
  • Focus on high performance
  • Super-high test coverage
  • HTTP helpers (redirection, caching, etc)
  • View system supporting 14+ template engines
  • Content negotiation
  • Executable for generating applications quickly

Docs & Community

  • Website and Documentation - [website repo]
  • GitHub Organization for Official Middleware & Modules
  • GitHub Discussions for discussion on the development and usage of Express

PROTIP Be sure to read the migration guide to v5

Quick Start

The quickest way to get started with express is to utilize the executable express(1) to generate an application as shown below:

Install the executable. The executable's major version will match Express's:

npm install -g express-generator@4

Create the app:

express /tmp/foo && cd /tmp/foo

Install dependencies:

npm install

Start the server:

npm start

View the website at: http://localhost:3000

Philosophy

The Express philosophy is to provide small, robust tooling for HTTP servers, making it a great solution for single page applications, websites, hybrids, or public HTTP APIs.

Express does not force you to use any specific ORM or template engine. With support for over 14 template engines via @ladjs/consolidate, you can quickly craft your perfect framework.

Examples

To view the examples, clone the Express repository:

git clone https://github.com/expressjs/express.git --depth 1 && cd express

Then install the dependencies:

npm install

Then run whichever example you want:

node examples/content-negotiation

Contributing

The Express.js project welcomes all constructive contributions. Contributions take many forms, from code for bug fixes and enhancements, to additions and fixes to documentation, additional tests, triaging incoming pull requests and issues, and more!

See the Contributing Guide for more technical details on contributing.

This project has a Code of Conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code.

Security Issues

If you discover a security vulnerability in Express, please see Security Policies and Procedures.

Running Tests

To run the test suite, first install the dependencies:

npm install

Then run npm test:

npm test

Current project team members

For information about the governance of the express.js project, see GOVERNANCE.md.

The original author of Express is TJ Holowaychuk

List of all contributors

TC (Technical Committee)

  • UlisesGascon - Ulises Gascón (he/him)
  • jonchurch - Jon Church
  • wesleytodd - Wes Todd
  • LinusU - Linus Unnebäck
  • blakeembrey - Blake Embrey
  • sheplu - Jean Burellier
  • crandmck - Rand McKinney
  • ctcpip - Chris de Almeida
<details> <summary>TC emeriti members</summary>

TC emeriti members

  • dougwilson - Douglas Wilson
  • hacksparrow - Hage Yaapa
  • jonathanong - jongleberry
  • niftylettuce - niftylettuce
  • troygoode - Troy Goode
</details>

Triagers

  • aravindvnair99 - Aravind Nair
  • bjohansebas - Sebastian Beltran
  • carpasse - Carlos Serrano
  • CBID2 - Christine Belzie
  • UlisesGascon - Ulises Gascón (he/him)
  • IamLizu - S M Mahmudul Hasan (he/him)
  • Phillip9587 - Phillip Barta
  • efekrskl - Efe Karasakal
  • rxmarbles - Rick Markins (he/him)
  • krzysdz
  • GroophyLifefor - Murat Kirazkaya
<details> <summary>Triagers emeriti members</summary>

Emeritus Triagers

  • AuggieH - Auggie Hudak
  • G-Rath - Gareth Jones
  • MohammadXroid - Mohammad Ayashi
  • NawafSwe - Nawaf Alsharqi
  • NotMoni - Moni
  • VigneshMurugan - Vignesh Murugan
  • davidmashe - David Ashe
  • digitaIfabric - David
  • e-l-i-s-e - Elise Bonner
  • fed135 - Frederic Charette
  • firmanJS - Firman Abdul Hakim
  • getspooky - Yasser Ameur
  • ghinks - Glenn
  • ghousemohamed - Ghouse Mohamed
  • gireeshpunathil - Gireesh Punathil
  • jake32321 - Jake Reed
  • jonchurch - Jon Church
  • lekanikotun - Troy Goode
  • marsonya - Lekan Ikotun
  • mastermatt - Matt R. Wilson
  • maxakuru - Max Edell
  • mlrawlings - Michael Rawlings
  • rodion-arr - Rodion Abdurakhimov
  • sheplu - Jean Burellier
  • tarunyadav1 - Tarun yadav
  • tunniclm - Mike Tunnicliffe
  • enyoghasim - David Enyoghasim
  • 0ss - Salah
  • ejcheng- Eric Cheng (he/him)
  • dakshkhetan - Daksh Khetan (he/him)
  • lucasraziel - Lucas Soares Do Rego
  • mertcanaltin - Mert Can Altin
  • dpopp07 - Dustin Popp
  • Sushmeet - Sushmeet Sunger
  • 3imed-jaberi - Imed Jaberi
</details>

License

MIT

<div align="center"> <a href="https://fastify.dev/"> <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fastify/graphics/HEAD/fastify-landscape-outlined.svg" width="650" height="auto" /> </a> </div> <div align="center">

CI Package Manager
CI Web
site neostandard javascript style CII Best Practices

</div> <div align="center">

NPM
version NPM
downloads Security Responsible
Disclosure Discord Contribute with Gitpod Open Collective backers and sponsors

</div> <br />

An efficient server implies a lower cost of the infrastructure, better responsiveness under load, and happy users. How can you efficiently handle the resources of your server, knowing that you are serving the highest number of requests possible, without sacrificing security validations and handy development?

Enter Fastify. Fastify is a web framework highly focused on providing the best developer experience with the least overhead and a powerful plugin architecture. It is inspired by Hapi and Express and as far as we know, it is one of the fastest web frameworks in town.

The main branch refers to the Fastify v5 release. Check out the 4.x branch for v4.

Table of Contents

  • Quick start
  • Install
  • Example
  • Core features
  • Benchmarks
  • Documentation
  • Ecosystem
  • Support
  • Team
  • Hosted by
  • License

Quick start

Create a folder and make it your current working directory:

mkdir my-app cd my-app

Generate a Fastify project with npm init:

npm init fastify

Install dependencies:

npm i

To start the app in dev mode:

npm run dev

For production mode:

npm start

Under the hood npm init downloads and runs Fastify Create, which in turn uses the generate functionality of Fastify CLI.

Install

To install Fastify in an existing project as a dependency:

npm i fastify

Example

// Require the framework and instantiate it // ESM import Fastify from 'fastify' const fastify = Fastify({ logger: true }) // CommonJS const fastify = require('fastify')({ logger: true }) // Declare a route fastify.get('/', (request, reply) => { reply.send({ hello: 'world' }) }) // Run the server! fastify.listen({ port: 3000 }, (err, address) => { if (err) throw err // Server is now listening on ${address} })

With async-await:

// ESM import Fastify from 'fastify' const fastify = Fastify({ logger: true }) // CommonJS const fastify = require('fastify')({ logger: true }) fastify.get('/', async (request, reply) => { reply.type('application/json').code(200) return { hello: 'world' } }) fastify.listen({ port: 3000 }, (err, address) => { if (err) throw err // Server is now listening on ${address} })

Do you want to know more? Head to the <a href="./docs/Guides/Getting-Started.md"><code><b>Getting Started</b></code></a>. If you learn best by reading code, explore the official demo.

Note

.listen binds to the local host, localhost, interface by default (127.0.0.1 or ::1, depending on the operating system configuration). If you are running Fastify in a container (Docker, GCP, etc.), you may need to bind to 0.0.0.0. Be careful when listening on all interfaces; it comes with inherent security risks. See the documentation for more information.

Core features

  • Highly performant: as far as we know, Fastify is one of the fastest web frameworks in town, depending on the code complexity we can serve more than 76 thousand requests per second.
  • Extensible: Fastify is fully extensible via its hooks, plugins, and decorators.
  • Schema-based: even if it is not mandatory we recommend using JSON Schema to validate your routes and serialize your outputs. Internally Fastify compiles the schema in a highly performant function.
  • Logging: logs are extremely important, but are costly; we chose the best logger to almost remove this cost, Pino!
  • Developer friendly: the framework is built to be very expressive and help developers in their daily use without sacrificing performance and security.

Benchmarks

Machine: EX41S-SSD, Intel Core i7, 4Ghz, 64GB RAM, 4C/8T, SSD.

Method: autocannon -c 100 -d 40 -p 10 localhost:3000 * 2, taking the second average

| Framework | Version | Router? | Requests/sec | | :----------------- | :------------------------- | :----------: | ------------: | | Express | 4.17.3 | ✓ | 14,200 | | hapi | 20.2.1 | ✓ | 42,284 | | Restify | 8.6.1 | ✓ | 50,363 | | Koa | 2.13.0 | ✗ | 54,272 | | Fastify | 4.0.0 | ✓ | 77,193 | | - | | | | | http.Server | 16.14.2 | ✗ | 74,513 |

These benchmarks were taken using https://github.com/fastify/benchmarks. This is a synthetic "hello world" benchmark that aims to evaluate the framework overhead. The overhead that each framework has on your application depends on your application. You should always benchmark if performance matters to you.

Documentation

  • Getting Started
  • Guides
  • Server
  • Routes
  • Encapsulation
  • Logging
  • Middleware
  • Hooks
  • Decorators
  • Validation and Serialization
  • Fluent Schema
  • Lifecycle
  • Reply
  • Request
  • Errors
  • Content Type Parser
  • Plugins
  • Testing
  • Benchmarking
  • How to write a good plugin
  • Plugins Guide
  • HTTP2
  • Long Term Support
  • TypeScript and types support
  • Serverless
  • Recommendations

Ecosystem

  • Core - Core plugins maintained by the Fastify team.
  • Community - Community-supported plugins.
  • Live Examples - Multirepo with a broad set of real working examples.
  • Discord - Join our discord server and chat with the maintainers.

Support

Please visit Fastify help to view prior support issues and to ask new support questions.

Version 3 of Fastify and lower are EOL and will not receive any security or bug fixes.

Fastify's partner, HeroDevs, provides commercial security fixes for all unsupported versions at https://herodevs.com/support/fastify-nes. Fastify's supported version matrix is available in the Long Term Support documentation.

Contributing

Whether reporting bugs, discussing improvements and new ideas, or writing code, we welcome contributions from anyone and everyone. Please read the CONTRIBUTING guidelines before submitting pull requests.

Team

Fastify is the result of the work of a great community. Team members are listed in alphabetical order.

Lead Maintainers:

  • Matteo Collina, https://x.com/matteocollina, https://www.npmjs.com/~matteo.collina
  • Tomas Della Vedova, https://x.com/delvedor, https://www.npmjs.com/~delvedor
  • KaKa Ng, https://www.npmjs.com/~climba03003
  • Manuel Spigolon, https://x.com/manueomm, https://www.npmjs.com/~eomm
  • James Sumners, https://x.com/jsumners79, https://www.npmjs.com/~jsumners

Fastify Core team

  • Aras Abbasi, https://www.npmjs.com/~uzlopak
  • Harry Brundage, https://x.com/harrybrundage, https://www.npmjs.com/~airhorns
  • Matteo Collina, https://x.com/matteocollina, https://www.npmjs.com/~matteo.collina
  • Gürgün Dayıoğlu, https://www.npmjs.com/~gurgunday
  • Tomas Della Vedova, https://x.com/delvedor, https://www.npmjs.com/~delvedor
  • Carlos Fuentes, https://x.com/metcoder95, https://www.npmjs.com/~metcoder95
  • Vincent Le Goff
  • Luciano Mammino, https://x.com/loige, https://www.npmjs.com/~lmammino
  • Jean Michelet, https://www.npmjs.com/~jean-michelet
  • KaKa Ng, https://www.npmjs.com/~climba03003
  • Luis Orbaiceta, https://www.npmjs.com/~luisorbaiceta
  • Maksim Sinik, https://x.com/maksimsinik, https://www.npmjs.com/~fox1t
  • Manuel Spigolon, https://x.com/manueomm, https://www.npmjs.com/~eomm
  • James Sumners, https://x.com/jsumners79, https://www.npmjs.com/~jsumners

Fastify Plugins team

  • Harry Brundage, https://x.com/harrybrundage, https://www.npmjs.com/~airhorns
  • Simone Busoli, https://x.com/simonebu, https://www.npmjs.com/~simoneb
  • Dan Castillo, https://www.npmjs.com/~dancastillo
  • Matteo Collina, https://x.com/matteocollina, https://www.npmjs.com/~matteo.collina
  • Gürgün Dayıoğlu, https://www.npmjs.com/~gurgunday
  • Tomas Della Vedova, https://x.com/delvedor, https://www.npmjs.com/~delvedor
  • Carlos Fuentes, https://x.com/metcoder95, https://www.npmjs.com/~metcoder95
  • Vincent Le Goff
  • Jean Michelet, https://www.npmjs.com/~jean-michelet
  • KaKa Ng, https://www.npmjs.com/~climba03003
  • Maksim Sinik, https://x.com/maksimsinik, https://www.npmjs.com/~fox1t
  • Frazer Smith, https://www.npmjs.com/~fdawgs
  • Manuel Spigolon, https://x.com/manueomm, https://www.npmjs.com/~eomm
  • Antonio Tripodi, https://www.npmjs.com/~tony133

Emeritus Contributors

Great contributors to a specific area of the Fastify ecosystem will be invited to join this group by Lead Maintainers when they decide to step down from the active contributor's group.

  • Tommaso Allevi, https://x.com/allevitommaso, https://www.npmjs.com/~allevo
  • Ethan Arrowood, https://x.com/arrowoodtech, https://www.npmjs.com/~ethan_arrowood
  • Çağatay Çalı, https://x.com/cagataycali, https://www.npmjs.com/~cagataycali
  • David Mark Clements, https://x.com/davidmarkclem, https://www.npmjs.com/~davidmarkclements
  • dalisoft, https://x.com/dalisoft, https://www.npmjs.com/~dalisoft
  • Dustin Deus, https://x.com/dustindeus, https://www.npmjs.com/~starptech
  • Denis Fäcke, https://x.com/serayaeryn, https://www.npmjs.com/~serayaeryn
  • Rafael Gonzaga, https://x.com/_rafaelgss, https://www.npmjs.com/~rafaelgss
  • Trivikram Kamat, https://x.com/trivikram, https://www.npmjs.com/~trivikr
  • Ayoub El Khattabi, https://x.com/ayoubelkh, https://www.npmjs.com/~ayoubelk
  • Cemre Mengu, https://x.com/cemremengu, https://www.npmjs.com/~cemremengu
  • Salman Mitha, https://www.npmjs.com/~salmanm
  • Nathan Woltman, https://x.com/NathanWoltman, https://www.npmjs.com/~nwoltman

Hosted by

<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openjs-foundation/artwork/main/openjs_foundation/openjs_foundation-logo-horizontal-color.png" width="250px;"/>

We are an At-Large Project in the OpenJS Foundation.

Sponsors

Support this project by becoming a SPONSOR! Fastify has an Open Collective page where we accept and manage financial contributions.

Acknowledgments

This project is kindly sponsored by:

  • NearForm
  • Platformatic

This list includes all companies that support one or more team members in maintaining this project.

License

Licensed under MIT.

For your convenience, here is a list of all the licenses of our production dependencies:

  • MIT
  • ISC
  • BSD-3-Clause
  • BSD-2-Clause

Dependencies Comparison

express

Dependencies

qs^6.16.0
depd^2.0.0
etag^1.8.1
once^1.4.0
send^1.1.0
vary^1.1.2
debug^4.4.0
fresh^2.0.0
cookie^0.7.1
router^2.2.0
accepts^2.0.0
type-is^2.1.0
parseurl^1.3.3
statuses^2.0.1
encodeurl^2.0.0
mime-types^3.0.0
proxy-addr^2.0.8
body-parser^2.3.0
escape-html^1.0.3
http-errors^2.0.0
on-finished^2.4.1
content-type^2.0.0
finalhandler^2.1.0
range-parser^1.2.1
serve-static^2.2.0
cookie-signature^1.2.1
merge-descriptors^2.0.0
content-disposition^2.0.1

Dev Dependencies

ejs^3.1.10
hbs4.3.1
nyc^17.1.0
after0.8.2
mocha^11.7.5
vhost~3.0.2
eslint8.47.0
marked^15.0.3
morgan1.12.1
supertest^6.3.0
connect-redis^8.0.1
cookie-parser1.4.7
cookie-session2.1.1
express-session^1.18.1
method-override3.0.0
pbkdf2-password1.2.1

Peer Dependencies

fastify

Dependencies

pino^9.14.0 || ^10.1.0
rfdc^1.3.1
avvio^9.0.0
semver^7.6.0
toad-cache^3.7.0
find-my-way^9.6.0
@fastify/error^4.0.0
process-warning^5.1.0
abstract-logging^2.0.1
light-my-request^6.0.0
secure-json-parse^4.0.0
@fastify/proxy-addr^5.0.0
fast-json-stringify^7.0.0
@fastify/ajv-compiler^4.0.5
@fastify/fast-json-stringify-compiler^5.0.0

Dev Dependencies

ajv^8.12.0
joi^18.0.1
yup^1.4.0
borp^1.0.0
vary^1.1.2
h2url^0.2.0
eslint^9.0.0
split2^4.2.0
undici^7.11.0
tstyche^7.0.0
typebox^1.0.81
ajv-i18n^4.2.0
cross-env^10.0.0
JSONStream^1.3.5
ajv-errors^3.0.0
autocannon^8.0.0
node-forge^1.3.1
proxyquire^2.1.3
typescript~6.0.2
@types/node^26.0.1
ajv-formats^3.0.1
http-errors^2.0.0
neostandard^0.12.0
concurrently^10.0.0
fast-json-body^1.1.0
fastify-plugin^6.0.0
ajv-merge-patch^5.0.1
branch-comparer^1.1.0
fastify-tsconfig^3.0.0
json-schema-to-ts^3.0.1
markdownlint-cli2^0.23.0
fluent-json-schema^6.0.0
@jsumners/line-reporter^1.0.1
@stylistic/eslint-plugin^5.1.0
@stylistic/eslint-plugin-js^4.1.0

Peer Dependencies

StarsIssuesVersionUpdatedⓘLast publish dateCreatedⓘPackage creation dateSizeⓘMinified + Gzipped size
E
express
69,5842635.3.0a month ago16 years agoinstall size 233.6 KB
F
fastify
37,3391755.12.7a month ago10 years agoinstall size 143.6 KB