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  5. ExpressJS vs Fastify vs Sails.js

ExpressJS vs Fastify vs Sails.js

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

ExpressJS
ExpressJS
Stacks35.1K
Followers24.0K
Votes1.6K
Sails.js
Sails.js
Stacks337
Followers511
Votes296
GitHub Stars22.9K
Forks1.9K
Fastify
Fastify
Stacks506
Followers523
Votes95
GitHub Stars34.9K
Forks2.5K

ExpressJS vs Fastify vs Sails.js: What are the differences?

# Introduction

Key differences between ExpressJS, Fastify, and Sails.js are outlined below:

1. **Performance**: Fastify is known to be significantly faster than Express and Sails due to its streamlined architecture and emphasis on low overhead.
2. **Plugin Ecosystem**: Express has a large and mature ecosystem of plugins and middleware, Fastify has a growing ecosystem with a focus on performance, while Sails.js has a smaller community and fewer plugins available.
3. **Code Structure**: Fastify enforces a more organized code structure by default compared to Express and Sails, making it easier to manage and scale larger applications.
4. **Error Handling**: Fastify provides a built-in error handling mechanism that simplifies the process of managing errors, while Express and Sails may require more manual error handling setup.
5. **Flexibility**: Express offers a high level of flexibility for developers to customize their applications, Fastify is more opinionated in its approach, and Sails.js provides a more integrated set of tools and conventions.
6. **Learning Curve**: Sails.js has a steeper learning curve compared to Express and Fastify due to its comprehensive features and conventions that developers need to adhere to.

In Summary, the key differences among ExpressJS, Fastify, and Sails.js lie in performance, plugin ecosystem, code structure, error handling, flexibility, and learning curve.```

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Advice on ExpressJS, Sails.js, 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.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

ExpressJS
ExpressJS
Sails.js
Sails.js
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.

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.

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
22.9K
GitHub Stars
34.9K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
1.9K
GitHub Forks
2.5K
Stacks
35.1K
Stacks
337
Stacks
506
Followers
24.0K
Followers
511
Followers
523
Votes
1.6K
Votes
296
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
  • 49
    Data-driven apis
  • 47
    Waterline ORM
  • 37
    Mvc
  • 32
    Easy rest
  • 25
    Real-time
Cons
  • 5
    Waterline ORM
  • 4
    Defaults to VueJS
  • 0
    Standard MVC
Pros
  • 21
    Performance
  • 13
    Easy to use
  • 12
    Lightweight
  • 9
    Open source
  • 9
    Middleware
Cons
  • 1
    Small community
Integrations
Node.js
Node.js
Grunt
Grunt
Node.js
Node.js
MySQL
MySQL
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
MongoDB
MongoDB
Socket.IO
Socket.IO
Node.js
Node.js

What are some alternatives to ExpressJS, Sails.js, Fastify?

Django REST framework

Django REST framework

It is a powerful and flexible toolkit that makes it easy to build Web APIs.

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.

hapi

hapi

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.

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).

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