What is the best alternative to Express.js?

Question

Built By the Slant team

Find the best product instantly.

4.7 star rating

Try it now - it's free

score 78 · Answer 1

Koa

Top Pro

Generator support from ground up

Using generators (a bleeding edge feature, even for Node.js) would clean up your code from the mess caused by all those callbacks; making your code more manageable. See More

Top Con

Community is relatively small

Top Pro

Extremely lightweight

Koa is very lightweight with just 550 lines of code. See More

Top Con

Not compatible with express style middleware

Koa uses generators which are not compatible with any other type of Node.js framework middleware. See More

Top Pro

async/await keywords are supported and has transcended beyond generator functions

Generators functions are of course a huge plus, but at the time Koa team has transcended generations functions and shifted towards async/await style programming. It has made the Koa best framework available in the market. See More

Top Con

Has no routes separated by HTTP method or URL pattern

Top Pro

Development team has a proven track record

Koa is developed by the team behind a widely used node.js framework (express.js). See More

Top Con

Wrong Middle ware, security issue

Top Pro

Built for ES6

See All Experiences

78 14

score 104 · Answer 2

Sails.js

Top Pro

Transparent support for Socket.io

Sails.js is built with a focus on building real time communication apps such as chat or multiplayer games, so naturally it has Socket.io extremely well supported. See More

Top Con

Poor ORM

The built-in Waterline is not well designed and is not suitable for production environments. Populating more than 1 level deep is a nightmare, there is no transaction support, new features/bug fixes are not implemented anywhere near a timely manner (the most requested feature 'deep populate' has been lingering in their github issues list for over a year and a half now). See More

Top Pro

MVC architecture

This could be a huge plus, if you prefer to build your apps using the Model View Controller architecture. Using Sails.js you'll find the task of separating the business logic from the user interface and keeping the interactions between them in a separate layer, extremely easy. See More

Top Pro

JSON API generated for free

Exposes public JSON API for free. No additional routing to be defined. Makes it pretty easy to access data from anywhere. See More

Top Pro

ORM that can be plugged into any database, or even custom web service

Sails.js uses Waterline ORM at its backend which means you can store your data in any datastore that you like; all you have to do is make a change to the Waterline adapter, this will allow you to store your data in MySQL/Redis or any other kind of database. See More

Top Pro

So easy to deploy and lift

Top Pro

Great documentation and structure

Clear documentation and easy to understand. The file structure gives you a way to understand where you can start to develop when you encounter a new Sails project See More

Specs

Repository:https://github.com/balderdashy/sails

See All Experiences

104 30

score 34 · Answer 3

Hapi

Top Pro

Backed by a major corporation

Hapi was developed and is still being used by Walmart. Being backed by such a major company means that it will not lose support any time soon and most importantly it's being developed by professionals and that you will always get support for it. See More

Top Con

Requires too much boilerplate

Hapi seems to be made with large applications in mind. The sheer amount of boilerplate code it requires is simply not practical for a small web app. This also means that there are few examples of Hapi applications around for beginners to learn from. See More

Top Pro

Consistency across applications

Hapi's philosophy is that configuration is more important than code. This is especially useful for very large teams because it helps developers maintain consistency and reusability throughout their code. See More

Specs

Platforms:Cross-platform

License:BSD-3-Clause

Written in:JavaScript

Repository:https://github.com/hapijs/hapi

See All Specs

34 4

score 59 · Answer 4

Adonisjs

Top Pro

Based on Laravel PHP Framework

If you are already programming in PHP with Laravel, you will have no trouble starting development with Node using Adonis. See More

Top Con

No NOSQL integration

Only used ORM, not ODM. See More

Top Pro

Similar to Rails

Top Pro

Built-in modules for everything

There are built-in modules for everything: Auth, Social Auth, mailing ect See More

Top Pro

Very good documentation

Top Pro

Easy to learn, especially if you're already familiar with Laravel

Top Pro

Has websocket support out of the box

Top Pro

Option for full-stack or api standalone implementation

You can choose to use the full-stack version or if you wish to build a RESTful API you can choose to use the api standalone version. See More

Specs

Language:JavaScript

See All Experiences

59 2

score 153 · Answer 5

Meteor

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Meteor was developed with simplicity in mind, even for beginners who have just started using JavaScript frameworks. One of the reasons that beginners should start with Meteor is that Meteor is a full-stack framework, this way they can get the complete learning experience when it comes to web development (back-end and front-end development), all by using a single platform and a single language. Furthermore, Meteor does not have complex and esoteric concepts that may be hard to grasp by a beginner, it has a clear documentation and well-established coding conventions. There's also a very useful resource for learning Meteor in the form of a book: Discover Meteor, by the authors of many Meteor packages. See More

Top Con

No native SEO support (no server-side rendering)

Meteor does not have support for server-side rendering of views, which is extremely helpful when it comes to SEO. However, there's a third-party server-side rendering package available for download. The Meteor team has also said that server-side rendering is on the roadmap. Though lately Google has announced that the search engine can render JS and CSS files just like modern web browsers See More

Top Pro

Full-stack reactivity

Changes in the database will be propagated to all subscribed clients in real time, without you having to write any code. See More

Top Con

Officially supports only MongoDB, which is well-known to have issues with data integrity

MongoDB advertises scalability but only if you don't care about data-integrity. There are other backend options but none of them are officially supported. See More

Top Pro

Isomorphic package system

A Meteor package can supply code for both the client and the server, and for mobile (Cordova) apps. For example, an autocomplete package supplies both server code to search a collection, and client code to display the results. The mdg:camera package supports the native camera if the app is built for mobile, or the HTML getUserMedia API to take pictures from the browser. See More

Top Con

Requires reliable network connection

It's common for the front-end and back-end to lose sync if an internet connection is flaky. Even though the connection should be in real-time, if the connection is weak, you may lose that real-time sync. For example, in chat applications you may have to refresh the page to get the latest updated data from the server. See More

Top Pro

Built-in security

Meteor takes care of many concerns with it's out-of-the-box security measures. See More

Top Pro

Seamless communication between client and server

Meteor is built on top of Node.js and jQuery on the client. Meteor enables the client and server to communicate data seamlessly, in real-time. You don't have to write any REST API or pub/sub code - Meteor takes care of it all automatically for you. See More

Top Pro

Integrated front-end library

Meteor uses both your existing front-end library and it's own library called Blaze, which is integrated beautifully in the framework and fulfills the purpose of a true MV* front-end framework. See More

Top Pro

Auto reload/refresh (hot code push)

Every time a change in the source file is saved, all connected clients will refresh automatically - browser tabs, mobile apps running in the simulator or on the physical device. Or, deploy a Meteor app (meteor deploy myapp) and all clients, plus all mobile apps with the server set to myapp.meteor.com will automatically reload to use the code changes. This drastically reduces the development cycle for apps in the App Store, where a regular update can wait for one to two weeks before being approved. See More

Top Pro

Support for MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis

While Meteor only supports MongoDB and Redis natively, MySQL support is on the roadmap, and there are 3rd-party packages that integrate MySQL reactively with Meteor to some extent, such as numtel:mysql. For reactive PostgreSQL support, there is numtel:pg. See More

Top Pro

Real-time testing framework

Meteor also has an official testing framework called Velocity. Velocity enables real-time unit testing and integration with Jasmine or Mocha syntax. Tests are automatically run when code is saved and the testing result is indicated by a green or red dot in the upper right corner of the app. See More

Top Pro

Includes latency compensation

The client will mimic instant server-side response, and updates automatically if it was different once the information is available. See More

Top Pro

Mobile apps from the same code base

Meteor can generate mobile (iOS and Android) apps from the same codebase as the web app, using the Cordova (PhoneGap) library (which brings native device functionality to JavaScript applications). Meteor-generated mobile apps are JavaScript, HTML and CSS bundles that run in a UIWebView (on iOS) or WebView (on Android). Apps can be run locally in the iOS/Android emulator, or on physical devices. You can also publish them to Google Play Store or Apple's App Store. Moreover, these hybrid mobile apps benefit from hot code push, which dramatically accelerates the development cycle. See More

Top Pro

Eliminates the need to look for a database to use

Meteor uses MongoDB, eliminating the choice among NoSQL databases. MongoDB is highly scalable - used to store petabytes of data and perform billions of operations daily at eBay, FIFA, Adobe, Craigslist, McAffee, Foursquare and others. See More

Top Pro

Gets rid of Node's callbacks

Although Meteor's server side runs on top of Node.js, it manages to avoid callbacks by making use of Fibers. See More

Top Pro

Extensive ecosystem

Meteor's package repository called Atmosphere has more than 5000 packages available. What's more is that Meteor can also use into the packages available for the Node ecosystem. See More

Top Pro

Powerful performance monitoring tools

Meteor uses Kadira which is an excellent performance monitoring tool for Meteor apps. It profiles CPU and RAM consumption, subscription latency and throughput etc. See More

Top Pro

VC-funded open-source

Bright future for Meteor - funded by venture capital and open-source. See More

Top Pro

In-app debugging

The community behind Meteor has created a useful application for debugging Meteor apps that will automatically delete collections and display client-side documents, allow you to control subscriptions and lets you modify the documents. Meteor also has great support for server-side debugging, and WebStorm has also released full support for Meteor, including debugging capabilities. See More

See All Experiences

153 51

score 18 · Answer 6

Restify

Top Con

Performance is not very optimum

As most of the benchmarks have already revealed, for large inflows of traffic, apps powered by Restify perform below par and are easily beaten by Express.js in terms of load time (in heavy traffic). See More

Top Pro

Automatic DTrace support

DTrace helps you with troubleshooting and building robust RESTful applications. See More

Top Pro

Specialized for Restful APIs

As the name suggests, Restify is devoted solely to creating an elegant REST API. The API is the core of your site or service, so it makes sense to use a framework that excels at that. See More

18 0

score 193 · Answer 7

FastAPI

Top Pro

Dependency injection

It has a simple but powerful dependency injection system, it can be used to handle authentication, per-user rate limiting, authorization controls (e.g. with roles), etc. See More

Top Con

Smaller community

Since FastAPI is relatively new, its community is smaller than Django Rest Framework. But it can grow with time. See More

Top Pro

Standards

It is based on standards: OpenAPI, JSON Schema and OAuth 2.0. See More

Top Pro

Data validation

It validates the data using the types you declared. Even in deeply nested JSON requests. See More

Top Pro

High-performance

It's based on Starlette and Pydantic, so, it's one of the fastest Python frameworks. See More

Top Pro

Editor completion

It is based on Python type declarations, so, editors and tools can give great support. Including type checks and autocompletion everywhere. See More

Top Pro

One of the fastest growing communities

Top Pro

Fast is really fast (!)

It's easy to develop API based applications in Python on deadlines for Android and IOS Development. See More

Top Pro

Automatic docs

It generates interactive API documentation automatically from your code. See More

Top Pro

Database independent

It's independent of database or ORM, but compatible with all of them. Including relational databases and NoSQL. See More

Top Pro

Async IO / optional

It's based on Async IO, which gives it high concurrency. But you can use non-async libraries and it runs them appropriately. See More

Top Pro

World class documentation

It has some of the best documentation of any framework. See More

Top Pro

WebSockets

Because it's an async framework, it can handle async-native protocols like WebSockets. See More

Top Pro

OAuth 2.0

It has integrated support for OAuth 2.0. Including declaring required scopes per endpoint. So, you can easily integrate it with external OAuth 2.0 providers or build your own with it. See More

Top Pro

Background tasks

Included support for background tasks, thanks to being based on Starlette. See More

Top Pro

Supports GraphQL

Python's graphene library is included as an optional dependency meaning that GraphQL API's are supported out of the box, with no additional tweaking needed. See More

Specs

Platforms:Cross-platform

License:MIT

Type:standard and feature rich micro-framework

Initial Release:2019

See All Specs

See All Experiences

193 29

score 8 · Answer 8

Dropwizard

Top Pro

Enhanced productivity and less timewasting

The application can be run and debugged from the IDE without the need to recompile or redeploy the WAR file. This is because a Dropwizard web application creates on main program which starts the jetty container. See More

Top Con

Does not allow a lot a freedom of choice

Dropwizard removes a lot of freedom that the developer may have with other frameworks because of the fact that it tries to do everything itself. It chooses the best Java libraries for the job required, without allowing the developer much choice. See More

Top Pro

Application metrics integrated into the framework

Dropwizard comes with application metrics integrated out of the box. These metrics provide a lot of useful information such as request/response time. For example, to get the execution time of a method, the @Timed annotation is used. See More

Top Pro

Quick project bootstrap

Starting a project with Dropwizard si very easy and bootstraping is quick and painless. All that's needed is a single dependency added in the pom.xml file and it's ready to go. See More

8 0

score 186 · Answer 9

Ruby on Rails

Top Pro

Massive community with lots of tutorials and guides

The sheer scale and massive number of developers using Rails has produced a large number of guides, tutorials, plugins, documentation, videos and anything that can help new and old Rails developers. See More

Top Con

Learning curve seems low at first, but starts becoming steeper

Rails' simplicity is deceptive. It's learning curve is really low at first, and the huge number of tutorials and guides out there for starting with Rails make it even easier. But it starts getting harder and harder as apps become more complicated. If good code conventions and OO design are not followed, then the codebase will be all over the place and it becomes impossible to maintain it. See More

Top Pro

Many plugins (gems) available

There are many third-party plugins (Ruby gems) available for Rails development. The larger ones and those that have a lot of downloads and users are very well documented and easy to use. See More

Top Con

Too much magic

So much behavior is implemented with dynamic behind-the-scenes changes to existing classes that obscure bugs are way too common. Conflicting interactions between multiple plugins that both try to change the same objects are a particularly pernicious example. See More

Top Pro

Ruby is a nice readable language

Ruby has a very clean syntax that makes code easier to both read and write than more traditional Object Oriented languages, such as Java. For beginning programmers, this means the focus is on the meaning of the program, where it should be, rather than trying to figure out the meaning of obscure characters. presidents = ["Ford", "Carter", "Reagan", "Bush1", "Clinton", "Bush2"] for ss in 0...presidents.length print ss, ": ", presidents[presidents.length - ss - 1], "\n"; end See More

Top Con

Too much convention

Top Pro

Good conventions

MVC is a great starting point, and perfect for APIs. You'll rarely if ever have to wonder "where should I put this code?" See More

Top Con

Not a very popular language outside of web development

Top Pro

Small projects are very easy and it's possible to finish one in very little time

The large number of documentation, tutorials, videos and guides which help new developers who are just starting with Rails make it seem very easy to create a small and simple application by relying on code generation and components that come out of the box with Rails. See More

Top Con

Bad performance

Among the slowest frameworks. If you want to scale, you will have to migrate to another land. See More

Top Pro

Cool language

Top Pro

Supported on every major cloud or VPS hosting service

Rails is supported on every major Cloud hosting service nowadays. There are also countless tutorials that help developers deploy their Rails apps if there are any problems on the way. See More

Top Pro

Meta-programming capabilities

Specs

Written in:Ruby

Default Template Engine:ERB

Default ORM:ActiveRecord

Default Test Engine:RSpec & Cucumber

See All Experiences

186 32

score 158 · Answer 10

Symfony

Top Pro

Open Source

Symfony is open source and released under the MIT license. See More

Top Con

Settings

Too many configurations. See More

Top Pro

Easy debugging with a built-in debug toolbar

Symfony comes with a built-in toolbar that helps developers debug their applications during the development phase. The toolbar is also extendable and new components, called panels can be added if needed to help with the debugging process. See More

Top Con

Very hard to install

Setting it up on webhost without a console is difficult. See More

Top Pro

Great plugin ecosystem

One of the greatest strengths of Symfony is it's amazing and large plugin ecosystem, which comes as a result of it's large and dedicated community. Having a large number of plugins means less development time and more productivity. See More

Top Con

Promotes bad development practices

Such as annotations via comments. See More

Top Pro

Highly active community

Symfony has one of the most active communities out of all the PHP frameworks. This is shown by the high number of commits made every day in the GitHub repo. See More

Top Con

Doctrine ORM

Symfony Standard Edition, which is the most widely used distribution, comes integrated with Doctrine, the most resource hogging ORM library. See More

Top Pro

Teaches you good practices

Symfony makes you be a better programmer. You have to deal with the latest object-oriented design patterns such as service-oriented architecture, dependency injection, interface abstraction, and so on. See More

Top Con

You need a lot of files to display a single page

For a simple hello world page you need about 5 files. See More

Top Pro

Uses YAML/XML/PHP/Annotation

Symfony makes use of XML, YAML or PHP annotations to create configurations in order to tell Doctrine on how properties of a certain class should be. See More

Top Pro

Powerful event system

Symfony has a powerful built-in event system that allows you to add flexibility to applications and makes it easier to maintain the codebase down the road. See More

Top Pro

Great templating engine

Uses Twig, which is a simple and easy to learn templating language that can also be used as a standalone engine, outside the framework. See More

Top Pro

Uses Doctrine ORM

Symfony makes use of the Doctrine ORM to add an abstraction layer over the database in order to maintain flexibility without having unnecessary code duplication. See More

Specs

158 31

score 76 · Answer 11

FeathersJS

Top Pro

Can sync events between different Node instances

Feather can sync events happening in two different Node processes or even servers in real-time. For example: an event happens in server A, the user connected to server B is instantly notified of that event. This is done through a central Redis or Mongo collection or through a websocket libraries' clustering library. See More

Top Con

Not so widely used

Could be problematic to convince the client use this framework in his/her project. See More

Top Pro

Easy REST APIs

Through services, Feathers provides instant CRUD functionality, it also can easily expose a RESTful and real-time API through HTTP/HTTPS and websockets. See More

Top Con

Not very beginner friendly

Although the documentation for Feathers is very good, it still needs some configuration in order to get Feathers up for developing something with it. See More

Top Pro

Can be integrated in an existing ExpressJS project

Since Feathers itself is built on top of Express (it's a thin wrapper over socket.io, primus and Express) and because of Feathers' highly modular nature, it's very easy to integrate Feathers in an existing Express project. See More

Top Pro

Plug-in any feature you need

Feathers makes extensive use of modules (which are called Feathers services). These services work like ExpressJS middleware and can be used with app.use('/path', serviceObject). Services help developers keep their applications modular and as minimal as possible, without any unnecessary libraries or bloat. See More

Top Pro

Support for different socket transports

FeatherJS uses primus which is a universal wrapper for real-time frameworks. Through primus you can easily choose which socket transport you want to use. See More

See All Experiences

76 18

score 118 · Answer 12

Yii

Top Pro

Rapid development through code scaffolding

Yii takes care of repetitive tasks through Gii, a web-based scaffolding tool. Gii takes care of code generation and creating code templates for: Models Controllers Forms Modules Extensions CRUD controller actions and views There are a lot of scaffolding templates made by community for Gii, that improve generated code functionality by a lot. Gii is very easy to extend yourself. See More

Top Con

Can be hard for beginners

Since Yii requires developers to write code following certain rules, or in other words, it requires developers to follow the "Yii way of doing things" it can be hard for beginners to warm up to it and start using it right away. See More

Top Pro

Comes with important security standarts

Since security is a crucial part of any application, Yii comes with great security features out of the box to help developers create a secure and reliable application. These security features contain but are not restricted to: Input validation Output filtering Features against SQL injection Cross-site scripting prevention See More

Top Con

Not very good at many to many relations

(but there is a good plugin, namely CAdvancedArBehavior extension to do this) See More

Top Pro

Highly extensible

Yii is built to be extremely extensible. Virtually every component of the framework can be extended programmatically. For example, if you want to add a unique id to your views, it's very easy to do: namespace app\components; class View extends yii\web\View { public $bodyId; /* Yii allows you to add magic getter methods by prefacing method names with "get" */ public function getBodyIdAttribute() { return ($this->bodyId != '') ? 'id="' . $this->bodyId . '"' : ''; } } See More

Top Pro

Integrated with a testing framework

Yii makes use of Codeception, a great PHP testing framework that helps developers run their tests. They can be unit, functional or acceptance tests since Codeception supports them all. See More

Top Pro

Lots of plugins available

Yii has about 2000 addons hosted on Yii's official website. These addons significantly decrease development time and increase the developer's efficiency. See More

Top Pro

License

Yii is free and open source and is distributed under the BSD License. See More

Top Pro

Strong community support

Yii has a strong and rather large community behind it. This is proven by the great number of blog posts, tutorials, guides and reviews on the Yii framework as well as the great number of extensions developed for it. See More

Top Pro

Easy to install

Yii uses Composer to handle it's dependency installation. This is rather easy and not very time consuming, although it should be noted that Composer is very resource-intensive considering what it's job is. But that is not really Yii's fault. See More

Top Pro

Best framework for CRUD operation

Yii Framework Provides most of features require for crud functionalities like GridView, Listview and DetailView (with jquery search and validation functions) by generating using GII. See More

Top Pro

Highly extensible without effort

Specs

PHP version:5.4+

Default Template Engine:Twig

Default ORM:Yii Active Record

See All Experiences

118 26

score 306 · Answer 13

Flask

Top Pro

Minimalist without losing power

Flask is very easy to get up and going, with vanilla HTML or with bootstrap pieces. It doesn't take much lines of Python to load Flask to get headers working, etc, and since it's all modular you don't have to have something you don't want in your application. See More

Top Con

Not async-friendly

Flask is explicitly not designed to handle async programming. See More

Top Pro

Lots of resources available online

Flask is one of the most popular Python web frameworks, if not the most popular one. As such, there's plenty of guides, tutorials, and libraries available for it. A large number of important Python libraries, such as SQLAlchemy have libraries for Flask, which add valuable bindings to make the development process and the integration between these libraries and Flask as easy as possible. See More

Top Con

Setting up a large project requires some previous knowledge of the framework

Setting up a large project with Flask is not that easy considering how there's no "official" way of doing it. Blueprints are a useful tool in this regard but require some additional reading and are a bit tricky to get right for a beginner. The lack of some defaults can also be problematic. Having to choose between different libraries for a certain task is never easy, especially if you have never worked with Flask before. See More

Top Pro

Extremely easy to build a quick prototype

Even though it's pretty minimalistic out of the box, Flask still provides the necessary tools to build a quick prototype for a web app right after a fresh install. With all the main components pretty much packed in the flask package, building a simple web app in a single Python file is as easy as it gets. See More

Top Con

Threadlocals and globals used everywhere

The default way of creating applications in flask makes it hard to use reusable and clean code. See More

Top Pro

Very flexible

Flask gives developers a lot of flexibility in how they develop their web applications. For example, the choice of not having an ORM, but instead choosing one suited to the task, or another area where Flask gives a lot of options to developers is the templating. They can use Jinja2, Flask's default templating language or choose from a number of different templating languages they desire. See More

Top Con

HTML-oriented, not API-oriented

Not necessarily designed for making APIs, though that is possible See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

The official documentation is very thorough and complete. Everything is explained in-depth and followed by extremely well-explained tutorials that tackle real-world problems. See More

Top Pro

Able to use ORM or "true SQL"

Specs

306 67

score 202 · Answer 14

ASP.NET Core

Top Pro

Fast and getting faster

Thanks to breakthroughs in ROSLYN compiler and the efforts of the .NET COre developer team, code written in C# can reach speeds just a step behind C++. See More

Top Con

Microsoft environment

Top Pro

Multi platform

Can run on Windows, Linux and Mac (also Visual Studio Code editor). See More

Top Pro

JSON optimization

In .NET Core 2.1 and 3.0, new APIs are added that make it possible to write JSON APIs that require less memory, using Span<T> and UTF8 strings, and improve throughput of applications like Kestrel, ASP.NET Core web server. See also Utf8JsonReader. See More

Top Pro

Tutorials and documentation quality

Both microsoft and 3rd party tutorials are mostly of high quality and encourage you to use the industry best-practices. See More

Top Pro

Built-in middleware

Built-in middleware featuring: Authentication, Cookie policy, Health Check, MVC, Session etc. See More

Top Pro

Hosting

Ability to host on IIS, Nginx, Apache, Docker, or self-host in your own process. See More

Top Pro

Ease of Use

Top Pro

Security

It is a very secure platform. See More

Top Pro

Tooling

Both VS and VSCode are powerful free IDEs that are well integrated with ASP.net Core. VS Community also allows for commercial use for projects with less than 5 developers. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Docker

Written in:C#

Default ORM:Entity Framework

Visual GUI Builder:Yes

See All Specs

See All Experiences

202 49

score 40 · Answer 15

CakePHP

Top Pro

Built-in ORM that's easy to use

Cake has a built-in ORM which is pretty easy to use and learn. Building queries can also be done very easily and fetching entire columns can be done in one or two lines of code. See More

Top Con

Slow

Because of legacy code, old concepts and prioritizing development speed over everything else, CakePHP is bloated and slow. See More

Top Pro

Fast development

Developing in CakePHP is very fast and flexible. CakePHP is about fast and reliable development, it achieves this by following the convention over configuration principle as it's heavily inspired by Rails (which follows the same programming paradigm). Convention over configuration is all about making it easier for the developer to start immediately writing code without worrying on what's going on "under the hood". See More

Top Pro

Large library of helper classes

CakePHP has a large library of helper classes with features such as: Authorization AJAX Forms E-mails Internationalization etc... See More

Top Pro

Exhaustive list of resources to learn CakePHP

Cake's great community has thrown together an exhaustive and amazing list of resources to get started with CakePHP. It's open source and can be found on GitHub. See More

Top Pro

Open Source

CakePHP open source and is licensed under the MIT license. See More

Specs

PHP version:5.4.16+

Default Template Engine:CakePHP Template

Default ORM:Default ORM included out of the box

See All Experiences

40 13

score 531 · Answer 16

Django

Top Con

Can feel bloated for small projects

Django's sheer scale and functionality can feel clunky and bloated for small applications. It has too many bells and whistles which can get in the way when developing a small scale application. See More

Top Pro

Developing a simple prototype can be very fast

Django's philosophy of batteries included means that experienced developers won't have to plan too much ahead on what kind of application infrastructure they need and instead just start developing web applications quickly. See More

Top Con

The documentation does not cover real-world scenarios

It is a larger documentation indeed, however is not deep and covers non real problems or even don't show any examples. You'll be better with Google or Stackoverflow See More

Top Pro

ORM support out of the box

Django supports Object-Relational Mapping. With models defined as Python classes which are actually subclasses of Django's django.db.models.Model. Each attribute of the model is then represented as a database field. Queries are lazily executed and Django gives developers an automatically-generated database-access API. See More

Top Con

Routing requires some knowledge of regular expressions

Given a GET request for /topics/426/viewpoints/1/sections/create, how does Django decide which bit of Python code is invoked to handle it? It compares the request path to your giant pile of regular expressions. And then if there's some other regular expression starts matching /top and all your requests for /topics/ start going there, good luck figuring out why. You won't be informed of any conflict until you notice you seem to be getting the wrong pages back. The structure of URL paths is almost universally hierarchal. There is no call to have anything as ridiculously flexible (and notoriously hard-to-read) as regular expressions to organize request routing. See More

Top Pro

Template errors fail silently by default

If you make a typo in a template variable, or change a view so that variable is no longer passed to the template, you won't get an error message pointing out that something has gone wrong. That reference will just be treated as if it is an empty string instead. There is a way to configure this, but since so many templates have been written assuming this behavior, nobody ever enables template errors because it would break so much of the existing support tools (e.g. the built-in admin interface). See More

Top Pro

Highly customizable

Django is in itself a highly customizable web framework. The database, template framework and ORM can all be swapped out. See More

Top Pro

Has an admin panel out of the box

Django comes with a highly customizable admin panel and authentication out of the box. This makes the development and production of a simple CMS extremely easy. See More

Top Pro

Mature software with many plugins developed over the years

Django was first released in 2005, it has had a lot of time to mature and become better with each release. It also has by far the largest community out of all python frameworks who have continuously over the years built and maintained many powerful plugins. See More

Top Pro

Clear and defined MVC organization

Django follows some pretty well established MVC patterns. With everything in place and where requests follow a clear path through urlresolvers, middleware, view and context processors. See More

Top Pro

Simple database management

Just a few lines of code can instruct Django to create all the tables and fields required in your database automatically. Schemas are managed with "migrations", that are also created automatically, and can be rolled out from your development box and implemented on production systems with just a single command. This performs any database changes required, from table creation, indexes, renaming fields, and pre-populating initial data. Each migration builds on the previous migrations, so you can trace the evolution of your data and even recreate the layout of your database at any point in the lifecycle of your application. See More

Specs

Multi Language Support:Excellent

Written in:Python

Default Template Engine:Django

Default ORM:Django ORM

See All Specs

See All Experiences

531 115

score 695 · Answer 17

Laravel 5

Top Pro

Good for building RESTful APIs

With migrations, powerful and intuitive Eloquent CRUD, resource routing, and simple JSON response out of the box, a complete REST API can be written in hours. See More

Top Con

Uses too much magic methods

It complicates debugging and autocompletion. See More

Top Pro

Comes with an excellent built-in ORM

Laravel's Eloquent ORM is a simple and fast Object-Relational Mapping which helps with organizing the application's database. It supports the most popular databases (MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, etc.) out of the box. See More

Top Con

Bloated

While the speed doesn't seem to be an issue with it (on local tests), in production it may be hindered. The framework creates a ton of files and folders, some of which your app might not even use. Not good if you don't like having a ton of folders and rigid non-standard PHP folder structure for development. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation

Laravel's documentation is thorough and very good. It covers everything and is very helpful to experienced and new users alike. See More

Top Con

Hard to use model properties

You need to check all model properties in database to know it exists, or declare all them manually. See More

Top Pro

Handles event queuing

Laravel supports event queuing and it does so in a very simple way. To create an event that should be queued just run: php artisan handler:event SendPurchaseConfirmation --event=PodcastWasPurchased --queued This creates a handler that implements the Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldBeQueued interface. Now when this handler is called it will automatically be queued by the event dispatcher. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

While a lot of times you can write things in plain PHP, it will hinder you down the line when you want to use core features and find that you have to rewrite code which then causes issues throughout the app. Documentation is good, but you need to know what you are looking for and practical examples are non-existent. Many features have been updated throughout the versions in such a short time that tutorials you find online are confusing to sort through outdated tutorials and guides that no longer work or have been depreciated. See More

Top Pro

Comes with its own CLI

Laravel comes out of the box with it's own CLI called Artisan. With Artisan developers can do several different tasks such as migrating databases, seeding databases, clearing the cache and much much more. See More

Top Con

Poor performance

Top Pro

Easy to write web apps with authentication

Laravel comes with Authentication capabilities and a fully-powered Auth class out of the box. For passwords it uses bcrypt. See More

Top Con

Follows bad design practices

Uses bad practices, like Singletons, Magic models, Middleware. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Top Pro

Gives developers a great degree of freedom in how they set up their project structure

Laravel allows for free configuration and does not force developers to use a single project structure, instead they can change it to how they wish. See More

Top Pro

Can use Symfony components

Laravel uses many libraries built for the Symfony PHP framework. Many of these libraries are well-built and have been tested by users before. Since the point of using a web framework is to shorten development time and to avoid reinventing the wheel for problems that have already been solved, then it's logical for a framework to use libraries already built to solve problems that have already been solved. See More

Top Pro

Extremely powerful template system

Laravel has a powerful template system called Blade. It's quite similar to Twig or Moustache with lots of curly braces but the real power comes from the usage of PHP code directly in the view. Blade templates compile directly to raw PHP and are processed in the server when a request is made. See More

Top Pro

Gulp tasks in the form of Laravel Elixir

In Laravel 5.0 they added Laravel Elixir, which provides an API for using Gulp tasks for Laravel applications. Elixir supports several CSS preprocessors and even some test tools. But it's still in the early stages of development and it will be developed even further in the following releases. With more methods and more Gulp tasks supported. See More

Top Pro

Great Ecosystem

Has a great Ecosystem with SAAS like: Forge, Envoyer, Nova & from 3rd parties like oh-dear See More

Top Pro

Great Community

Specs

License:MIT License

Initial Release:June 2011

695 164

score 49 · Answer 18

Play Framework

Top Pro

Scala

It's like Java, but more Haskell-y. See More

Top Con

Backward incompatibility

The jump from Play 1 to Play 2.x caused a lot of confusion. While it is important to have some kind of evolution, sometimes it causes backward incompatibility which can create some problems. It makes tutorials or modules made for the old version obsolete. This can make it hard for beginners to find useful resources. The template engine which used Groovy now uses Scala. See More

Top Pro

Asynchronous Core

Top Con

Not as many resources to learn

Other languages and frameworks have countless tutorials, books, moocs, etc. Java and Play does not have nearly as much. See More

Top Pro

Interoperable with Java

Top Pro

Fast

Top Pro

Good documentation and a great community

Play has quite a large community which provides numerous tutorials and videos related to developing with Play. The Play official documentation covers many things, such as the framework itself but also specific stuff such as Akka, SBT and Netty. There are also many big companies that base their main sites around Play, one of them is LinkedIn which provides third-party documentation on a regular basis. See More

Top Pro

Play is an extensive ecosystem

Play uses Akka for concurrency, Scala for a templating engine, Netty as a client-server framework and SBT (Simple Build Tool) for building. And they all come out of the box. Play also comes with the option to scaffold your applications. Play is an all-embracing ecosystem designed to increase developer productivity and shorten development times. See More

Top Pro

Simple for beginners

Play is very simple to get started. The documentation is very helpful for beginners and advanced users alike and the official website has a great "Getting Started" tutorial to begin developing with Play. See More

Top Pro

Readable code

Play framework's convention over configuration methodology makes most Play projects have a very similar structure. This means that the code written for the framework is very readable. This enables a developer to switch between applications without having to relearn the ecosystem for every project. The built-in templating system also helps with code and makes it possible to have a very low count of lines of code. See More

Top Pro

Can use Java, one of the most widely known languages

Java is one of the most widely known languages, so people coming from that background can jump right in and not have to learn a new language syntax. See More

Top Pro

Good Websocket Support

See All Experiences

49 14

score 236 · Answer 19

Spring-boot

Top Pro

Inherits all of Spring's strengths

Boot is just a thin configuration layer over Spring Framework, as such it inherits all the strengths of Spring. See More

Top Con

Lacking in UI development

While actually very good and with a very complete and rich feature set to develop and maintain code on the server side, it still doesn't provide any rich framework for building good user interfaces. See More

Top Pro

Preconfigured starters

Top Pro

Fast prototyping

Spring boot is built for fast prototyping. See More

Top Pro

Kick down to Spring

Specs

Platforms:Cross-platform

Written in:Java

Repository:https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot

236 53

score 23 · Answer 20

ActFramework

Top Pro

Performance

There are two aspects of performance: how quick a developer can deliver a feature and how fast the app is running on the product server. Act is designed to deliver excellent results in both aspects. With unbeatable developing experience, Act makes it very easy to release a feature; on the other side Act is very fast in runtime. Check out this 3rd party benchmark result. See More

Top Con

Incomplete microservice support

Although Act is built to be a great framework that supports microservice development, it lacks some of the key features at the moment, like sending requests to other microservices from within the app, service governance, and messaging handling. See More

Top Pro

Hot reload

You never restart while you're working on your Act application. Act's hot reload feature is fast and stable, it makes you feel like dealing with scripting language frameworks like Django or NodeJs. Watch this video and feel it. See More

Top Con

Very small community

As of February 2017, Act is a brand new framework (even though the project started at the end of 2014). Community is still forming. See More

Top Pro

Scalability

Act is built as a stateless framework. It supports horizontal scale. See More

Top Con

Functional testing support still under development

Developers are still working on innovative functional testing support for Act. See More

Top Pro

Secure

Act is built as a secure product. It provides built-in CSRF/XSS prevention mechanism. And act-aaa makes it very easy to implement Authentication/Authorization/Auditing in your app. See More

Top Con

Documentation is still being written

Act's documentation is still under development. See More

Top Pro

Superb RESTful support

Act makes creating RESTful service a kids game. It features AdaptiveRecord (allows front end to drive the data structure), JSON response control (just declare the fields you want to present or hide) and RESTful URL routing with path variables. See More

Top Pro

Easy to deploy

ActFramework is not a servlet framework and there are no requirements on containers/app servers. It has a small package size (a helloworld distribution package size is less than 20 MB), a small memory feet print (a helloworld app heap usage is less than 20MB) and a fast boot up speed (a helloworld app starts in less than 3s). See More

Top Pro

Templating

Act's view architecture is very flexible and support using multiple view engines in your app. The default template engine is Rythm, a very developer friendly and powerful template engine. Act also support other templating solutions including freemarker, velocity, thymeleaf, and mustache via plugins. See More

Top Pro

Configuration for multiple environments

Act supports load configuration from a common dir and then overwriting it from a profile dir. Makes it very easy to manage configurations in different environments (e.g., dev, uat, sit, prod) Watch this video to see the innovative way Act delivers its configuration support. See More

Top Pro

Concise and expressive

Act does not require you to put Annotation when it is able to infer the intention from other parts of the code, i.e., you don't use @PathVariable or @RequestParam to tell Act the binding parameter name. And you don't need a ModelMap to bind variables to render argument names. Act has sophisticated byte class scanner to detect the variable names to do bindings automatically. See More

Top Pro

Comply to standards

Act's IoC is built on top of Genie, a fast dependency injection library that fully supports JSR330, and Act's validation solution is built on top of JSR303. Act is NOT an odd framework to most Java developers. Unlike Play1.x, ACT applications follow the standard maven project structure and it is very easy to integrate other Java libraries. See More

Top Pro

Database access

Act's DB layer is extremely easy to use. It supports SQL databases (through ebean orm) and MongoDB (through morphia). Using multiple datasource can never be that easy with Act's DB layer. Go here for more information on this. See More

Top Pro

Fast and flexible routing

You can configure your routing in either Spring MVC/Jersey style with annotation or Play style with route table or a combination of both. Act's routing supports RESTful URL path variables, optionally validated with regular expressions. See More

See All Experiences

23 0

What is the best alternative to Express.js?

Generator support from ground up

Community is relatively small

Extremely lightweight

Not compatible with express style middleware

async/await keywords are supported and has transcended beyond generator functions

Has no routes separated by HTTP method or URL pattern

Development team has a proven track record

Wrong Middle ware, security issue

Built for ES6

Transparent support for Socket.io

Poor ORM

MVC architecture

JSON API generated for free

ORM that can be plugged into any database, or even custom web service

So easy to deploy and lift

Great documentation and structure

Backed by a major corporation

Requires too much boilerplate

Consistency across applications

Based on Laravel PHP Framework

No NOSQL integration

Similar to Rails

Built-in modules for everything

Very good documentation

Easy to learn, especially if you're already familiar with Laravel

Has websocket support out of the box

Option for full-stack or api standalone implementation

Easy to learn

No native SEO support (no server-side rendering)

Full-stack reactivity

Officially supports only MongoDB, which is well-known to have issues with data integrity

Isomorphic package system

Requires reliable network connection

Built-in security

Seamless communication between client and server

Integrated front-end library

Auto reload/refresh (hot code push)

Popular

Support for MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis

Real-time testing framework

Includes latency compensation

Mobile apps from the same code base

Eliminates the need to look for a database to use

Gets rid of Node's callbacks

Extensive ecosystem

Powerful performance monitoring tools

VC-funded open-source

In-app debugging

Performance is not very optimum

Automatic DTrace support

Specialized for Restful APIs

Dependency injection

Smaller community

Standards

Data validation

High-performance

Editor completion

One of the fastest growing communities

Fast is really fast (!)

Automatic docs

Database independent

Async IO / optional

World class documentation

WebSockets

OAuth 2.0

Background tasks

Supports GraphQL

Enhanced productivity and less timewasting

Does not allow a lot a freedom of choice

Application metrics integrated into the framework

Quick project bootstrap

Massive community with lots of tutorials and guides

Learning curve seems low at first, but starts becoming steeper

Many plugins (gems) available

Too much magic

Ruby is a nice readable language

Too much convention

Good conventions

Not a very popular language outside of web development