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. Utilities
  3. API Tools
  4. Microservices Tools
  5. Dapr vs Express Gateway

Dapr vs Express Gateway

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Express Gateway
Express Gateway
Stacks62
Followers167
Votes10
Dapr
Dapr
Stacks96
Followers336
Votes9
GitHub Stars25.2K
Forks2.0K

Dapr vs Express Gateway: What are the differences?

Introduction

When considering different technologies for building and managing APIs, developers often come across options like Dapr and Express Gateway. Understanding the key differences between these two tools is crucial for making an informed decision on which one to choose for a project.

  1. Architecture: Dapr is a portable, event-driven runtime that simplifies building microservices and applications by providing a set of building blocks. On the other hand, Express Gateway is a customizable and scalable API gateway that acts as a central entry point for all incoming client requests. While Dapr focuses on enhancing microservices architecture, Express Gateway is tailored specifically for API management.

  2. Language Support: Dapr supports multiple programming languages such as C#, Java, JavaScript, and Python, making it versatile for developers with different language preferences. Express Gateway, on the other hand, is built on Node.js and focuses primarily on providing a seamless experience for Node.js developers. The choice between these tools may depend on the programming language expertise of the development team.

  3. Community and Support: Dapr has a growing community of contributors and users, providing ample resources for learning and troubleshooting issues. Express Gateway, though popular in the Node.js ecosystem, might have a more niche community due to its specific use case. The availability of community support and resources can significantly impact the ease of adoption and maintenance for developers.

  4. Scalability and Performance: Dapr's underlying architecture is designed to be highly scalable, supporting horizontal scaling of microservices to handle increased workloads efficiently. Express Gateway also offers scalability features but is more focused on handling API traffic efficiently. Depending on the scalability requirements of a project, developers may need to evaluate the performance and scaling capabilities of these tools.

  5. Configuration Flexibility: Dapr provides a declarative model for defining application components, which can simplify deployment and management tasks. Express Gateway offers a flexible configuration approach through YAML or JSON files, allowing developers to customize and fine-tune API gateway settings according to specific requirements. The choice between these tools may depend on the level of control and flexibility needed in managing APIs.

  6. Integration Capabilities: Dapr is designed to integrate seamlessly with various cloud providers and external services, making it suitable for building cloud-native applications. Express Gateway, on the other hand, offers integrations with popular authentication providers and plugins for enhancing API security and functionality. Depending on the integration needs of a project, developers may need to consider the compatibility and extensibility of these tools.

In Summary, understanding the key differences between Dapr and Express Gateway in terms of architecture, language support, community, scalability, configuration flexibility, and integration capabilities is essential for making an informed decision on choosing the right tool for API management and development projects.

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

Express Gateway
Express Gateway
Dapr
Dapr

A cloud-native microservices gateway completely configurable and extensible through JavaScript/Node.js built for ALL platforms and languages. Enterprise features are FREE thanks to the power of 3K+ ExpressJS battle hardened modules.

It is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient, stateless and stateful microservices that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.

Authentication;Authorization;API Management;Microservices;JSON Web Token (JWT);OAuth2;Custom Plugins;Consumer Mgmt;YAML Driven; REST API;Pipelines;Built-in Policies;Hot Reload and Restart;Actions & Conditions;
Event-driven Pub-Sub system with pluggable providers and at-least-once semantics; Input and Output bindings with pluggable providers; State management with pluggable data stores; Consistent service-to-service discovery and invocation; Opt-in stateful models: Strong/Eventual consistency, First-write/Last-write wins; Cross platform Virtual Actors; Rate limiting; Built-in distributed tracing using Open Telemetry; Runs natively on Kubernetes using a dedicated Operator and CRDs; Supports all programming languages via HTTP and gRPC; Multi-Cloud, open components (bindings, pub-sub, state) from Azure, AWS, GCP; Runs anywhere - as a process or containerized; Lightweight (58MB binary, 4MB physical memory); Runs as a sidecar - removes the need for special SDKs or libraries; Dedicated CLI - developer friendly experience with easy debugging; Clients for Java, Dotnet, Go, Javascript and Python
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
25.2K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
2.0K
Stacks
62
Stacks
96
Followers
167
Followers
336
Votes
10
Votes
9
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 4
    Microservices, Body manipulation
  • 3
    Custom Plugins
  • 3
    Amazing api gwy. Easy and powerful configuration
Cons
  • 2
    Deprecated
Pros
  • 3
    Manage inter-service state
  • 2
    MTLS "for free"
  • 2
    Zipkin app tracing "for free"
  • 2
    App dashboard for rapid log overview
Cons
  • 1
    Additional overhead
Integrations
Prometheus
Prometheus
Google Kubernetes Engine
Google Kubernetes Engine
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Docker
Docker
Auth0
Auth0
StatsD
StatsD
Node.js
Node.js
Azure Kubernetes Service
Azure Kubernetes Service
ExpressJS
ExpressJS
.NET Core
.NET Core
Java
Java
Python
Python
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
JavaScript
JavaScript
Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform
Golang
Golang

What are some alternatives to Express Gateway, Dapr?

Istio

Istio

Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.

Azure Service Fabric

Azure Service Fabric

Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices. Service Fabric addresses the significant challenges in developing and managing cloud apps.

Moleculer

Moleculer

It is a fault tolerant framework. It has built-in load balancer, circuit breaker, retries, timeout and bulkhead features. It is open source and free of charge project.

ArangoDB Foxx

ArangoDB Foxx

It is a JavaScript framework for writing data-centric HTTP microservices that run directly inside of ArangoDB.

Zuul

Zuul

It is the front door for all requests from devices and websites to the backend of the Netflix streaming application. As an edge service application, It is built to enable dynamic routing, monitoring, resiliency, and security. Routing is an integral part of a microservice architecture.

linkerd

linkerd

linkerd is an out-of-process network stack for microservices. It functions as a transparent RPC proxy, handling everything needed to make inter-service RPC safe and sane--including load-balancing, service discovery, instrumentation, and routing.

Jersey

Jersey

It is open source, production quality, framework for developing RESTful Web Services in Java that provides support for JAX-RS APIs and serves as a JAX-RS (JSR 311 & JSR 339) Reference Implementation. It provides it’s own API that extend the JAX-RS toolkit with additional features and utilities to further simplify RESTful service and client development.

Ocelot

Ocelot

It is aimed at people using .NET running a micro services / service oriented architecture that need a unified point of entry into their system. However it will work with anything that speaks HTTP and run on any platform that ASP.NET Core supports. It manipulates the HttpRequest object into a state specified by its configuration until it reaches a request builder middleware where it creates a HttpRequestMessage object which is used to make a request to a downstream service.

Micro

Micro

Micro is a framework for cloud native development. Micro addresses the key requirements for building cloud native services. It leverages the microservices architecture pattern and provides a set of services which act as the building blocks

Claudia

Claudia

Claudia helps you deploy Node.js microservices to Amazon Web Services easily. It automates and simplifies deployment workflows and error prone tasks, so you can focus on important problems and not have to worry about AWS service quirks.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana