Instead of Express: Hono

Why Hono is better

• Hono runs unchanged on Cloudflare Workers, Fastly Compute, Deno, Bun, AWS Lambda and Node.js because it uses only Web Standard APIs. Express is tied to Node.js.
• It is small. Hono has zero dependencies and its hono/tiny preset is under 14KB minified; Hono's docs put Express at 572KB.
• It is faster on Node.js too. Fastify's own benchmark, updated in November 2026, measured Hono at 84,930 requests per second on a simple GET against 67,794 for Express 5.3.
• Middleware and helpers for common needs ship in the core package, and Hono is written in TypeScript with types as a first-class feature, so handlers are typed without extra packages.

When to keep Express

Keep Express for an existing app that works, especially one that leans on Express middleware such as Passport or multer. Express 5 is actively maintained, had security releases in October 2026, and still has roughly twice as many npm downloads as Hono.

Switching

Expect to rewrite the routing layer. Handlers change from (req, res) to a single context object that returns a response through c.json() or c.text(). Express middleware does not plug into Hono. On Node.js you add the @hono/node-server adapter and call serve(app). Business logic, database code and validation schemas move across unchanged, so you can port one route group at a time.

Watch out

Hono was designed for edge runtimes first and runs on Node.js through an adapter that needs Node.js 18.14.1 or later. Its third-party middleware ecosystem is much smaller than Express's, so check that the auth, upload and session pieces you need exist. On Node.js alone, Fastify benchmarks ahead of it.

Also worth a look

• Fastify A mature server framework with a plugin system and schema-based validation, fastest in its own benchmark; pick it when you deploy only to Node and want maximum throughput.

More newer, better web frameworks

• Gatsby →, use Astro
• Flask →, use FastAPI