The Best NodeJS Frameworks for 2021

Choosing a framework for your NodeJS application can be tough. There are so many of them, with their own strengths and weaknesses. At the end of the day, the framework you choose will depend on your programming environment, and what you want your app to do. Some frameworks are lightweight, fast and don’t care about how you build your app. Others have more features but may compel you to use their engines and organize your code in a certain way.

The goal of this article is to compare some of the most popular Node frameworks so that you can ultimately decide which one is right for your project.

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What is a Framework?

Generally speaking, a framework is a support system for your application. Node provides a set of tools to interface with things your app needs, like the network and the filesystem. A framework extends these capabilities and abstracts away some of the more complicated aspects of development. For example, a handler in your code might receive a request object from the network. A framework could intercept this request object before it reaches your handler, adding some additional methods and capabilities to make it easier to work with.

There are several flavors of the Node framework, and each provides a different programming experience.

MVC Frameworks

MVC (Model View Controller) architecture is a useful design pattern that splits application logic into three parts — models to define the shape of the data, views to organize the user interface, and controllers to communicate between the two. Node frameworks that support MVC architecture are useful if you don’t want to spend too much time worrying about how to organize your code.

Express

We may as well get Express out of the way first, as no list of Node frameworks would be complete without it. Express is still the reigning champion of popular frameworks, as its 47.5K Github stars, 1.8K watches, and 7.7K forks will attest. This alone makes it an excellent choice. It is robust, well-tested, and there is a large community maintaining and working with it who can support you and answer questions.

Express touts itself as a “fast, un-opinionated, minimalist framework for Node.” The focus is on performance and providing only what you need. The framework provides little functionality of its own, instead of allowing for extensive middleware chaining to process requests.

Getting Started

Create a server.js or app.js file in the root of your project and add the following code

const express = require('express')
const app = express()

app.get('/', function (req, res) {
  res.send('Hello World')
})

app.listen(3000)

Run the server with

node ./server.js

and visit localhost:3000 in your browser to see the response.

Sails

Sails emphasize stability and ease of use and provides a lot more out of the box than Express. It leans in the full stack direction, providing support for authentication, its own ORM for database interfacing, WebSockets and templating. Sails is more opinionated than Express — meaning you must use the provided ORM (Waterline) and templating engine (EJS, although an extension called Consolidate provides support for other templating engines that are compatible with Express.) Sails also boasts an impressive API generator called Blueprints, which allows you to generate API endpoints with minimal manual coding. From the Sails documentation:

…if you create a User.js model file in your project, then with blueprints enabled you will be able to immediately visit /user/create?name=joe to create a user, and visit /user to see an array of your app’s users. All without writing a single line of code!

Sails has been around for a long time and is among the most popular frameworks according to its Github stars, views and forks. Many large companies rely on Sails, meaning it’s robust enough to support enterprise-level applications.

Getting Started

Sails provides a powerful command-line interface to get up and running with a new app very quickly

npm install -g sails
sails new <project_name>

You’ll be prompted to choose either a web app template with built-in authentication and login or an empty app. Once Sails finishes setting up the basics, cd into your project folder and run

sails lift

You can now navigate to localhost:1337 to see the generated homepage.

Full-Stack Frameworks

Full-stack frameworks provide structure and functionality for your entire application – from the client to the server to the database. A full-stack framework might come with many features, including templating engines, WebSocket libraries, and ORMs. Depending on the size of your team and application, these features could be very useful or they could be more than you need.

Meteor

Meteor is the second-most starred, viewed and forked Node framework on Github. The community is vibrant and the documentation is extensive. Documentation includes best practices, recommended style guides and many tutorials and technical articles. Meteor comes bundled with npm, and its own package manager called Atmosphere, as well as built-in support for a Mongo datastore and easy integration with React, Angular or Blaze. It is more opinionated than Express or Sails.

Meteor uses “data on the wire” as opposed to server-side rendering — so the server sends data, not HTML, and the client renders it. The Meteor build tool provides out of the box support for mobile through Cordova and supports hot reloading.

Getting Started

Meteor’s build tool is what creates, compiles and runs your app. Download it via curl.

curl https://install.meteor.com/
meteor create <project_name>

This will create the file structure for everything you need in a basic Javascript app, organized into /client and /server directories. cd into your project root and run

meteor run

The app should now be running on localhost:3000

REST API Frameworks

If you have the client-side of your application covered, you might just need a framework for the server part of your stack. In this case, you might go with a simple REST API framework just to handle CRUD requests to your server. You could pretty much do this with Express, but there are also frameworks specifically geared toward handling this particular case.

Loopback

Loopback is the second most popular REST API framework, according to Github. Developed by IBM, it is a “highly extensible, open-source Node framework based on Express that allows you to quickly create APIs and microservices.” It comes with a command-line tool for generating projects and creating controllers and models with ease and provides add-on support for easy authentication and authorization. It doesn’t provide any support for views or templating or a dedicated ORM, as it is intended to be used only as an API.

Loopback allows you to create a dynamic API in minutes with minimal coding. The development cycle is very quick, and the file structure is clean and useful. Setup includes options to configure eslint, prettier, mocha and docker right out of the box.

Getting Started

npm install -g @loopback/cli

lb4 <project_name>

You’ll be prompted to answer several questions about how you want your app set up, and the file structure will be scaffolded. cd into the project root and run

npm start

To create a new route, run

lb4 controller

and answer the prompts. Once the controller file is created, you can import the Loopback get function and use it to setup the controller

import {get} from '@loopback/rest';

export class HelloController {
  @get('/hello')
  hello(): string {
    return 'Hello world!';
  }
}

Summary: Best Node.js Frameworks

Conclusions

It’s difficult to choose a definitive “best” Node framework, as the framework you choose will change based on your needs. If you want the freedom to choose your own libraries and third-party integrations, Express or Loopback might be your best bet. But if your team wants to stand up a brand new app front to back in a matter of a few days, Meteor or Sails might better suit your needs. 

There are many other frameworks beyond those discussed in this article, and the best way to know what will work for your app or team is to read through the docs and try a few out.

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Related Links

• How to use an API
  • with JavaScript
• How to create an API
  • with Node.js and Express.js
• How to Build a Weather App with Node.js
• How to Set Up a GraphQL Server with Node and Express