Compare the Top Microframeworks as of April 2025

What are Microframeworks?

Microframeworks are lightweight web application frameworks that provide basic functionality such as routing, request and response handling, templating and input validation. They typically do not include any libraries or helpers for common tasks, leaving developers with the freedom to choose their own libraries for such functions. Microframeworks are designed for applications that require minimal setup and fast development cycles, although they may also be suitable for larger applications. They offer an alternative to full-stack frameworks. Compare and read user reviews of the best Microframeworks currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

  • 1
    Express

    Express

    OpenJS Foundation

    Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications. With a myriad of HTTP utility methods and middleware at your disposal, creating a robust API is quick and easy. Express provides a thin layer of fundamental web application features, without obscuring Node.js features that you know and love. Express has no notion of a database. This concept is left up to third-party Node modules, allowing you to interface with nearly any database. In Express, 404 responses are not the result of an error, so the error-handler middleware will not capture them. This behavior is because a 404 response simply indicates the absence of additional work to do; in other words, Express has executed all middleware functions and routes, and found that none of them responded.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 2
    Koa

    Koa

    Koa

    Koa is a new web framework designed by the team behind Express, which aims to be a smaller, more expressive, and more robust foundation for web applications and APIs. By leveraging async functions, Koa allows you to ditch callbacks and greatly increase error handling. Koa does not bundle any middleware within its core, and it provides an elegant suite of methods that make writing servers fast and enjoyable. A Koa application is an object containing an array of middleware functions that are composed and executed in a stack-like manner upon request. Koa is similar to many other middleware systems that you may have encountered such as Ruby's Rack, Connect, and so on - however, a key design decision was made to provide high-level "sugar" at the otherwise low-level middleware layer. This improves interoperability, and robustness, and makes writing middleware much more enjoyable.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 3
    restify

    restify

    restify

    A Node.js web service framework optimized for building semantically correct RESTful web services ready for production use at scale. restify optimizes for introspection and performance and is used in some of the largest Node.js deployments on Earth. Running at scale requires tracing problems back to their origin by separating noise from the signal. restify is built from the ground up with post-mortem debugging in mind. Staying true to the spec is one of the foremost goals of the project. You will see references to RFCs littered throughout GitHub issues and the codebase. restify is used by some of the industry's most respected companies to power some of the largest deployments of Node.js on planet Earth—the future of Node.js REST development. Setting up a server is quick and easy. Like many other Node. js-based REST frameworks, restify leverages a Sinatra-style syntax for defining routes and the function handlers that service those routes.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 4
    hapi

    hapi

    hapi

    Build powerful, scalable applications, with minimal overhead and full out-of-the-box functionality, your code, your way. Developed initially to handle Walmart’s Black Friday sales, hapi continues to be the proven choice for enterprise-grade backend needs. When you install hapi, every single line of code you get has been verified. You never have to worry about some deep dependency being poorly maintained (or handed over to someone sketchy). hapi is the only leading node framework without any external code dependencies. hapi requires the most secure settings to manage, control, and distribute code, including 2FA for all contributors. Every hapi component comes with the most secure defaults out of the box. Along with protecting server load with payload limits and request timeouts, hapi blocks error messages that could leak information or echo back exploits. The most comprehensive authorization and authentication API available in a Node framework.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 5
    Echo

    Echo

    Echo

    High-performance, extensible, minimalist Go web framework. Highly optimized HTTP router with zero dynamic memory allocation which smartly prioritizes routes. Build robust and scalable RESTful API, easily organized into groups. Automatically install TLS certificates from Let's Encrypt. HTTP/2 support improves speed and provides a better user experience. Many built-in middleware to use, or define your own. Middleware can be set at root, group, or route level. Data binding for HTTP request payload, including JSON, XML or form data. API to send a variety of HTTP responses, including JSON, XML, HTML, file, attachment, inline, stream, or blob. Template rendering using any template engine. Customized central HTTP error handling. Easily extendable API. Optimized HTTP router which smartly prioritizes routes. Build robust and scalable RESTful APIs. Extensible middleware framework. Define middleware at root, group, or route level Data binding for JSON, XML, and form payload.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 6
    Jersey

    Jersey

    Eclipse Foundation

    Developing RESTful web services that seamlessly support exposing your data in a variety of representation media types and abstracting away the low-level details of client-server communication is not an easy task without a good toolkit. In order to simplify the development of RESTful web services and their clients in Java, a standard and portable JAX-RS API has been designed. Jersey RESTful web services 3. x framework is an open-source, production-quality, framework that provides support for Jakarta RESTful web services 3.0. Jersey framework is more than the JAX-RS reference implementation. Jersey provides its own API that extends the JAX-RS toolkit with additional features. Track the JAX-RS API and provide regular releases of production quality reference implementations that ship with GlassFish. Provides APIs to extend Jersey & build a community of users and developers. Makes it easy to build RESTful Web services utilizing Java and the Java Virtual Machine.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 7
    Rustless

    Rustless

    Rustless

    Rustless is a REST-like API micro-framework for Rust. It's designed to provide a simple DSL to easily develop RESTful APIs on top of the Iron web framework. It has built-in support for common conventions, including multiple formats, subdomain/prefix restriction, content negotiation, versioning, and much more. Rustless in a port of Grape library from Ruby world. Based on hyper, an HTTP library for Rust. Like Rust itself, Rustless is still in the early stages of development, so don't be surprised if APIs change and things break. If something's not working properly, file an issue or submit a pull request! Rustless is based on Iron, which is based on Hyper, which is synchronous. Hyper has a lot of limitations right now, and can't handle many simultaneous connections, especially with keep-alive. So it is highly recommended to use a light asynchronous web server such as Nginx as a reverse proxy server with Rustless.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 8
    Nancy

    Nancy

    Nancy

    Welcome to Nancy, our main inspiration is the Sinatra framework for Ruby and, hence, Nancy was named after the daughter of Frank Sinatra. NancyFx is the name of the umbrella project that contains all the components. Nancy is a lightweight, low-ceremony, framework for building HTTP-based services on .NET and Mono. The goal of the framework is to stay out of the way as much as possible and provide a super-duper-happy path to all interactions. This means that everything in Nancy is setup to have sensible defaults and conventions, instead of making you jump through hoops and go through configuration hell just to get up and running. With Nancy you can go from zero to website in a matter of minutes. Nancy is built to run anywhere and we mean it. Right from the start, Nancy was designed to not have any dependencies on existing frameworks. Built with the .NET framework client profile, Nancy can be used pretty much wherever you want to.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 9
    LoopBack

    LoopBack

    LoopBack

    A highly extensible Node.js and TypeScript framework for building APIs and microservices. A brand new LoopBack core to deliver great extensibility and flexibility written in TypeScript/ES2017. Create powerful APIs easily with a new creative experience for defining REST APIs and handling API requests/responses. A new, improved programming model with dependency injection and new concepts such as components, mixins, repositories, etc. make this the most extensible version yet. The LoopBack 4 CLI is a command-line interface that can scaffold a project or extension. The CLI provides the fastest way to get started with a LoopBack 4 project that adheres to best practices. LoopBack is a highly-extensible, open-source Node.js framework that enables you to create dynamic end-to-end REST APIs with little or no coding. Access data from major relational databases, MongoDB, SOAP, and REST APIs. Incorporate model relationships and access controls for complex APIs.
  • 10
    FastAPI

    FastAPI

    FastAPI

    FastAPI is a modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3.7+ based on standard Python type hints. Fast: Very high performance, on par with NodeJS and Go (thanks to Starlette and Pydantic). One of the fastest Python frameworks available. Minimize code duplication, multiple features from each parameter declaration.
  • 11
    hug

    hug

    hug

    Drastically simplify API development over multiple interfaces. With hug, design and develop your API once, then expose it however your clients need to consume it. Be it locally, over HTTP, or through the command line - hug is the fastest and most modern way to create APIs on Python3. hug has been built from the ground up with performance in mind. It is built to consume resources only when necessary and is then compiled with Cython to achieve amazing performance. As a result, hug consistently benchmarks as one of the fastest Python frameworks and without question takes the crown as the fastest high-level framework for Python 3. hug makes it easy to expose multiple versions of your API. With hug you can simply specify what version or range of versions an endpoint supports and then automatically have that enforced and communicated to your API's users.
  • 12
    Falcon

    Falcon

    Falcon

    Falcon is a blazing fast, minimalist Python web API framework for building robust app backends and microservices. The framework works great with both asyncio (ASGI) and gevent/meinheld (WSGI). The Falcon web framework encourages the REST architectural style. Resource classes implement HTTP method handlers that resolve requests and perform state transitions. Falcon complements more general Python web frameworks by providing extra reliability, flexibility, and performance wherever you need it. A number of Falcon add-ons, templates, and complementary packages are available for use in your projects. We've listed several of these on the Falcon wiki as a starting point, but you may also wish to search PyPI for additional resources.
  • 13
    Bottle

    Bottle

    Bottle

    Bottle is a fast, simple and lightweight WSGI micro web-framework for Python. It is distributed as a single file module and has no dependencies other than the Python Standard Library. Requests to function-call mapping with support for clean and dynamic URLs. Fast and pythonic built-in template engine and support for mako, jinja2 and cheetah templates. Convenient access to form data, file uploads, cookies, headers and other HTTP-related metadata. Built-in HTTP development server and support for paste, bjoern, gae, cherrypy or any other WSGI capable HTTP server.
  • 14
    Sinatra

    Sinatra

    Sinatra

    Sinatra includes a number of built-in settings that control whether certain features are enabled. Settings are application-level variables that are modified using one of the set, enable, or disable methods and are available within the request context via the settings object. Applications are free to set custom settings as well as the default, built-in settings provided by the framework. In its simplest form, the set method takes a setting name and value and creates an attribute on the application. Extensions provide helper or class methods for Sinatra applications. These methods are customarily listed and described on extensions home pages. Using an extension is usually as simple as installing a gem or library and requiring a file.
  • 15
    Ruby Grape

    Ruby Grape

    Ruby Grape

    An opinionated framework for creating REST-like APIs in Ruby.
  • 16
    Javalin

    Javalin

    Javalin

    You never extend classes and you rarely implement interfaces. Javalin is just a few thousand lines of code on top of Jetty, and its performance is equivalent to raw Jetty code. Due to its size, it's very easy to reason about the source code. Other Java and Kotlin web frameworks usually offer one version for each language. Javalin is being made with inter-operability in mind, apps are built the same way in both Java and Kotlin. Javalin runs on top of Jetty, one of the most used and stable web servers on the JVM. You can configure the Jetty server fully, including SSL and HTTP3 and everything else that Jetty offers. Many lightweight Java and Kotlin web frameworks don't support OpenAPI, but Javalin does.
  • 17
    Slim Framework

    Slim Framework

    Slim Framework

    Slim is an ideal tool to create APIs that consume, repurpose, or publish data. Slim is also a great tool for rapid prototyping. Heck, you can even build full-featured web applications with user interfaces. More importantly, Slim is super fast and has very little code. You don’t always need a kitchen-sink solution like Symfony or Laravel. These are great tools, for sure. But they are often overkill. Instead, Slim provides only a minimal set of tools that do what you need and nothing else. First, you need a web server like Nginx or Apache. A Slim app contains routes that respond to specific HTTP requests. Each route invokes a callback and returns an HTTP response. To get started, you first instantiate and configure the Slim application. Next, you define your application routes.
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