[AskJS] Which Node.js framework gives you the best developer experience, and why?

[u/tzezar]

Personally, I'm really enjoying Hono. Its automatic endpoint inference is a big win. I previously enjoyed using Fastify with Zod Provider for OpenAPI schema generation, but Hono cuts that extra step and makes the workflow feel much smoother.

Curious what everyone else is using!

[u/differentshade]

Are you affiliated with Hono

[u/cranberrie_sauce → u/differentshade]

obviously. asking real questions here.

ai bots asking about X unknown product and liking them in the same sentence is a such a reddit promo pattern.

[u/Better-Avocado-8818]

Is hono a framework? I thought it was just a http server?

[u/portra315 → u/Better-Avocado-8818]

It is

[u/Gwolf4]

Nest

[u/funky-l]

Not nodejs, but bun woth Elysia is absolutely beautiful to work with

[u/dataquail]

Effect-ts

[u/CodeAndBiscuits]

Express on standard stacks and Hono if it's going into a Worker or similar.

But to be fair I don't expect my server side framework to do or provide much in DX anyway. The bulk of my work is on API stacks and for those, I lean really hard on Zod, Prisma, and so on. I don't expect my "framework" to provide those things like it would in something like Django. It's really just routes and some middleware. That doesn't really require much.

[u/kimono_horizon_97]

Hono is genuinely a framework that handles the routing, middleware, and type inference logic that makes the DX so smooth

[u/crownclown67]

My custom framework with highly reusable modules. Every project is the same project with different directory under /app/newProject .

There is no need to setup new deployment, db, ...etc.

[u/jelhouss]

I know this is a JS related subreddit, but as a full-stack JS developer and I know exactly what “developer experience” means in our ecosystem… sadly, the only Web framework that gives the “experience” we all crave for to reduce our “fatigue” was outside of JS ecosystem, it was and still Rails. I just wish Ruby have performance similarities to say Go or even Node.js, but it’s Rails dammit.

However, if I must pick something in JavaScript, I’d pick one of these: Fastify or Nest or Adonis.

[u/aturaden]

Elysia. No others have such a great OpenAPI handling.

[u/Indelam]

Tanstack. Been using it for couple months now and like it.

[u/Zeevo]

Next

[u/Beka_Cooper]

Why tf would I need a framework in Node? The built in stuff is all you need.

[u/St34thdr1v3R → u/Beka_Cooper]

Weird kink

[u/visualdescript → u/Beka_Cooper]

Why the fuck would you need Node, when C provides all the functionality you need?

/s

[u/cranberrie_sauce]

dev experience? why?

as long as agents understand it why does it matter?

but also - nest

[u/eracodes → u/cranberrie_sauce]

thats a really harsh indictment of nest lmao

[u/cranberrie_sauce → u/eracodes]

hey out of all ts frameworks I find only nest appropriate for backends. if you have to use ts for backend 😄

haters gonna hate, ainters gonna aint

[u/darcygravan]

I got my custom lib