StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Microframeworks
  4. Microframeworks
  5. Koa vs Slim

Koa vs Slim

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Slim
Slim
Stacks273
Followers391
Votes152
GitHub Stars12.2K
Forks2.0K
Koa
Koa
Stacks812
Followers483
Votes12
GitHub Stars35.7K
Forks3.2K

Koa vs Slim: What are the differences?

  1. Request handling: Koa is more low-level and allows for more control over request handling, including the ability to directly manipulate requests and responses. On the other hand, Slim provides a higher level of abstraction for request handling, making it easier to work with HTTP requests using convenient methods and features.
  2. Middleware: Koa uses a more modern and streamlined middleware approach, where middleware functions are composable and can be used in a more flexible manner. In contrast, Slim follows a more traditional middleware pattern, with middleware being added in a linear fashion to the application pipeline.
  3. Error handling: Koa has a more robust error handling mechanism, allowing for the easy catching and handling of errors within the middleware stack. Slim also supports error handling, but the approach is more simplistic compared to Koa.
  4. Flexibility: Koa is known for its flexibility and minimalistic design, allowing developers to build applications according to their preferences and needs. Slim, while still flexible, provides more structure and conventions out of the box, making it easier for developers to get started quickly.
  5. Async/Await support: Koa has native support for async/await, making it easier to work with asynchronous code and avoiding callback hell. Slim, on the other hand, requires additional libraries or custom implementations to fully support async/await.
  6. Community and Documentation: Koa has a smaller but active community, with comprehensive documentation and a focus on modern web development practices. Slim has a larger community and more extensive documentation, making it easier to find resources and support when working with the framework.

In Summary, Koa and Slim differ in their approach to request handling, middleware, error handling, flexibility, async/await support, and community/documentation.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

Slim
Slim
Koa
Koa

Slim is easy to use for both beginners and professionals. Slim favors cleanliness over terseness and common cases over edge cases. Its interface is simple, intuitive, and extensively documented — both online and in the code itself.

Koa aims to be a smaller, more expressive, and more robust foundation for web applications and APIs. Through leveraging generators Koa allows you to ditch callbacks and greatly increase error-handling. Koa does not bundle any middleware.

-
Provides 3 different kinds of functions as middleware; common function; async function; generator function
Statistics
GitHub Stars
12.2K
GitHub Stars
35.7K
GitHub Forks
2.0K
GitHub Forks
3.2K
Stacks
273
Stacks
812
Followers
391
Followers
483
Votes
152
Votes
12
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 33
    Microframework
  • 27
    API
  • 22
    Open source
  • 21
    Php
  • 11
    Fast
Pros
  • 6
    Async/Await
  • 5
    JavaScript
  • 1
    REST API
Integrations
PHP
PHP
Node.js
Node.js

What are some alternatives to Slim, Koa?

ExpressJS

ExpressJS

Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications.

Django REST framework

Django REST framework

It is a powerful and flexible toolkit that makes it easy to build Web APIs.

Sails.js

Sails.js

Sails is designed to mimic the MVC pattern of frameworks like Ruby on Rails, but with support for the requirements of modern apps: data-driven APIs with scalable, service-oriented architecture.

Sinatra

Sinatra

Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort.

Lumen

Lumen

Laravel Lumen is a stunningly fast PHP micro-framework for building web applications with expressive, elegant syntax. We believe development must be an enjoyable, creative experience to be truly fulfilling. Lumen attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as routing, database abstraction, queueing, and caching.

Fastify

Fastify

Fastify is a web framework highly focused on speed and low overhead. It is inspired from Hapi and Express and as far as we know, it is one of the fastest web frameworks in town. Use Fastify can increase your throughput up to 100%.

Falcon

Falcon

Falcon is a minimalist WSGI library for building speedy web APIs and app backends. We like to think of Falcon as the Dieter Rams of web frameworks.

hapi

hapi

hapi is a simple to use configuration-centric framework with built-in support for input validation, caching, authentication, and other essential facilities for building web applications and services.

TypeORM

TypeORM

It supports both Active Record and Data Mapper patterns, unlike all other JavaScript ORMs currently in existence, which means you can write high quality, loosely coupled, scalable, maintainable applications the most productive way.

FeathersJS

FeathersJS

Feathers is a real-time, micro-service web framework for NodeJS that gives you control over your data via RESTful resources, sockets and flexible plug-ins.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase