What's the modern, maintained alternative to Express.js for Node?

When looking for a modern, maintained alternative to Express.js, Fastify stands out as an excellent choice. It prioritizes performance, is actively maintained, and boasts a rich feature set.

Fastify: A High-Performance Alternative

• Stars: 36,564
• Last Updated: Recently (last pushed on June 21, 2026)
• Maintenance Status: ✅ Actively maintained
• Open Issues: 155
• License: MIT
• URL: Fastify on GitHub

Description: Fastify is designed to be fast and low overhead. It emphasizes a powerful plugin architecture that makes it highly extensible. Inspirited by both Hapi and Express, Fastify claims to be one of the fastest web frameworks available, capable of serving high throughput with minimal CPU usage.

Key Features:

• Excellent performance benchmarks (serving 76,000+ requests per second).
• Schema-based validation (JSON Schema recommended).
• Built for high developer expressiveness and extensibility.
• Great logging capabilities with integrated use of Pino for efficient logging.

Comparison with Express.js

• Express.js has a significantly higher star count (69,230), but it is also seen as the older and more established framework.
• Despite having a larger community and more middleware options, Express has some known performance limitations compared to Fastify, particularly under high-load situations.

Fastify vs Express.js Performance Metrics

Recommendation

Fastify is the best choice for new projects that prioritize performance and scalability, especially if you are developing APIs or high-throughput web applications. While Express.js remains a robust option for many use cases, Fastify's modern design caters to higher performance demands with a developer-friendly approach.

Choose Fastify if you need a high-performance web framework, choose Express.js if you prefer a more established tool with extensive community support.