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. ExpressJS vs Fastify vs hapi

ExpressJS vs Fastify vs hapi

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

ExpressJS
ExpressJS
Stacks35.1K
Followers24.0K
Votes1.6K
hapi
hapi
Stacks434
Followers456
Votes87
Fastify
Fastify
Stacks506
Followers523
Votes95
GitHub Stars34.9K
Forks2.5K

ExpressJS vs Fastify vs hapi: What are the differences?

Introduction:
ExpressJS, Fastify, and Hapi are popular web frameworks for building web applications using Node.js. While they all serve a similar purpose, there are key differences between them that developers should consider when choosing a framework for their project.

1. **Performance**: Fastify is known for its exceptional performance as it is built from the ground up with speed in mind, making it one of the fastest web frameworks available. ExpressJS, on the other hand, offers a balance between performance and flexibility, catering to a wider range of use cases. Hapi, although slower than Fastify and ExpressJS, provides robust features out of the box, making it a suitable choice for enterprise applications where performance might not be the top priority.

2. **Ecosystem and Plugins**: ExpressJS has a vast ecosystem and a large number of plugins available, making it easy for developers to find solutions to common problems and integrate third-party services. Fastify, while not as extensive as ExpressJS, has a growing ecosystem with a focus on performance-oriented plugins. Hapi takes a different approach by emphasizing a curated selection of plugins maintained by the core team, ensuring compatibility and consistency but offering fewer options compared to ExpressJS and Fastify.

3. **API Design and Flexibility**: ExpressJS is known for its simplicity and minimalistic design, providing developers with the freedom to design their APIs the way they want. Fastify follows a similar principle but enforces some best practices to ensure performance and security. Hapi, on the other hand, comes with a more opinionated approach to API design, providing a set of conventions and structures that developers are encouraged to follow for consistency and maintainability.

4. **Middleware Handling**: ExpressJS uses middleware functions to handle requests and responses, allowing developers to chain multiple functions in a specific order. Fastify follows a similar middleware approach but with a focus on performance optimization. Hapi, on the other hand, uses a plugin system to encapsulate middleware functionality, providing a more modular and structured way of handling request processing.

5. **Error Handling**: ExpressJS provides a flexible error handling mechanism, allowing developers to define custom error handlers and middleware to manage errors effectively. Fastify also offers robust error handling capabilities, focusing on maintaining performance even in error scenarios. Hapi, with its centralized error handling system, provides consistency in error responses across different parts of the application, simplifying error management for developers.

6. **Community and Support**: ExpressJS has a large community of developers and extensive documentation, making it easy for beginners to get started and find help online. Fastify, although not as large as ExpressJS, has an active community and growing support, especially for performance-related issues. Hapi, with its focus on enterprise applications, offers professional support and consulting services, making it a suitable choice for companies with specific needs and requirements.

In Summary, ExpressJS, Fastify, and Hapi differ in terms of performance, ecosystem, API design, middleware handling, error handling, and community support, catering to different use cases and developer preferences in the Node.js ecosystem.

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

Advice on ExpressJS, hapi, Fastify

Tony
Tony

Oct 21, 2020

Review

I personally like using a wholly JS stack, with TypeORM + MySql/Postgres over MongoDb + Mongoose because TypeOrm's Typescript support is much stronger. After developing large projects with Typescript, there is no going back to regular javascript (typings help catch a LOT of errors / maintains data structure !)

Sticking with a javascript stack will allow you to share certain aspects of your application between front and backend. For example: one particularly common feature is to validate API call data and form entry data. Both of these are the same data shape typically (aside from pagination, metadata, etc), and can benefit from a single schema for validation. I use Yup to define this schema, then in the front and back end I can utilize this definition instead of rewriting the same logic in two different languages.

Same goes for certain utility functions such as data structure typings, decryption, encryption, sanitizing inputs, formatting of data, and other utilities. No point of writing these in two languages when both frontend and backend will use them. It will also help reduce developer work load, due to less tests / code to work with.

The only thing you must ensure in your import chain the frontend never imports any secret variables or sensitive logic used by the backend, as that will get bundled into your application. All shared imports should be individual modules

If you want to go one step further, next.js is basically create react app with server side rendering (SSR). This would allow you to skip the annoying step of configuring separate backend and frontend build tools. Might be worth exploring depending on your skill level.

817 views817
Comments

Detailed Comparison

ExpressJS
ExpressJS
hapi
hapi
Fastify
Fastify

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.

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.

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%.

Robust routing;HTTP helpers (redirection, caching, etc);View system supporting 14+ template engines;Content negotiation;Focus on high performance;Executable for generating applications quickly;High test coverage
-
100% asynchronous: all the core is implemented with asynchronous code, in this way not even a millisecond is wasted.;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 up to 20000 request per second.;Extendible: Fastify is fully extensible via its hooks, plugins and decorators.;Schema based: even if it is not mandatory we recommend to use JSON Schema to validate your routes and serialize your outputs, internally Fastify compiles the schema in an 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 the developer in his daily use, without sacrificing performance and security.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
34.9K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
2.5K
Stacks
35.1K
Stacks
434
Stacks
506
Followers
24.0K
Followers
456
Followers
523
Votes
1.6K
Votes
87
Votes
95
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 381
    Simple
  • 336
    Node.js
  • 244
    Javascript
  • 193
    High performance
  • 152
    Robust routing
Cons
  • 27
    Not python
  • 17
    Overrated
  • 14
    No multithreading
  • 9
    Javascript
  • 5
    Not fast
Pros
  • 27
    Makes me Hapi making REST APIs
  • 14
    Configuration
  • 14
    Simpler than other REST libraries
  • 13
    Quality Driven Ecosystem
  • 13
    Modularization
Pros
  • 21
    Performance
  • 13
    Easy to use
  • 12
    Lightweight
  • 9
    Open source
  • 9
    Middleware
Cons
  • 1
    Small community
Integrations
Node.js
Node.js
Node.js
Node.js
Node.js
Node.js

What are some alternatives to ExpressJS, hapi, Fastify?

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.

Slim

Slim

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.

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.

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.

Flask

Flask

Flask is intended for getting started very quickly and was developed with best intentions in mind.

Echo

Echo

It is a high performance, extensible, minimalist web framework for Go (Golang).

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