Hono Has a Free API: The Ultrafast Web Framework That Runs Everywhere

Express is slow. Fastify is fast. Hono is ultrafast — and runs on every JavaScript runtime that exists.

What Is Hono?

Hono (炎 — flame in Japanese) is a lightweight web framework built on Web Standards. It runs on Cloudflare Workers, Deno, Bun, Node.js, Vercel, Netlify, AWS Lambda — anywhere JavaScript runs.

import { Hono } from 'hono'

const app = new Hono()

app.get('/', (c) => c.text('Hello Hono!'))
app.get('/api/users', (c) => c.json([{ name: 'Alice' }, { name: 'Bob' }]))
app.post('/api/users', async (c) => {
  const body = await c.req.json()
  return c.json({ created: body }, 201)
})

export default app

Middleware Ecosystem

import { cors } from 'hono/cors'
import { logger } from 'hono/logger'
import { bearerAuth } from 'hono/bearer-auth'
import { cache } from 'hono/cache'
import { compress } from 'hono/compress'
import { validator } from 'hono/validator'
import { zValidator } from '@hono/zod-validator'

const app = new Hono()

app.use('*', cors())
app.use('*', logger())
app.use('/api/*', bearerAuth({ token: 'secret' }))
app.get('/static/*', cache({ cacheName: 'my-app', cacheControl: 'max-age=3600' }))

// Zod validation
const createUserSchema = z.object({ name: z.string(), email: z.string().email() })
app.post('/users', zValidator('json', createUserSchema), (c) => {
  const data = c.req.valid('json') // Fully typed!
  return c.json(data, 201)
})

RPC Client (Type-Safe API Calls)

// Server
const routes = app.get('/api/users/:id', (c) => {
  return c.json({ id: c.req.param('id'), name: 'Alice' })
})

export type AppType = typeof routes

// Client — full type safety!
import { hc } from 'hono/client'
import type { AppType } from './server'

const client = hc<AppType>('http://localhost:3000')
const res = await client.api.users[':id'].$get({ param: { id: '1' } })
const data = await res.json() // { id: string, name: string } — fully typed!

Benchmark

Framework	Requests/sec
Hono (Bun)	130,000
Fastify	65,000
Express	15,000

Why Hono

• Ultrafast — RegExpRouter is the fastest JS router
• Tiny — 14KB minified, zero dependencies
• Universal — one codebase, any runtime
• Type-safe — RPC client, validated inputs
• JSX — built-in JSX/TSX for server-side rendering

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Building web APIs? Check out my developer tools or email [e-mail].