Fastify vs. Express
With plenty of web frameworks out there, it gets hard for web developers to choose the right one for their project.
It is essential to choose the right web framework as it saves developers time and effort when developing web applications like web services, web resources, and web APIs.
Fastify and Express are two web frameworks for Node.js. In this shot, we will compare both these frameworks and highlight some key differences.
About Express
Express, or Express.js, is a web application framework that has been around for quite a long time and has become the standard server framework for Node.js.
About Fastify
Fastify is inspired by Hapi and Express and provides a faster alternative to Express with less overhead. It is built as a general-purpose web framework, but it shines when it comes to its fast HTTP APIs.
Fastify vs. Express
Both frameworks are open-source and actively developed.
Fastify claims to be the fastest web framework around. Benchmarks back up their claim with Fastify performing nearly twice as fast as Express in a simple ‘hello world’ overhead benchmark. The only case where Fastify falls behind Express is in handling empty requests.
Fastify provides full encapsulation for plug-ins, automatically parses JSON with relatively faster rendering, and provides quick routing. Among other benefits, Fastify also has a cleaner syntax for writing async code in controllers.
Express, however, has a stronger user base with plenty of documentation available. Express is so popular that it is ubiquitously associated with Node.js and part of the MEAN and MERN stack.
In summary, Fastify promises faster performance with low overhead, but Express is a familiar framework that many developers may be more comfortable working with.
