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Alex Merced
Alex Merced

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Chart of Backend Web Frameworks 2021

Find tutorials for many of these frameworks at my website, devNursery.com

There are a lot of frameworks out there this is just a list of as many I was willing to research and list.

Each one is labeled based on my judgement on whether it's workflow is more Express like (minimalist) or Rails like (Robust) so you can find the framework that matches your style in your language.

After the list I added some links to some articles to find even more. Enjoy!

Framework Language Key Words
Express NodeJS Minimalist
Koa NodeJS Minimalist
Fastify NodeJS Minimalist
Merver NodeJS Minimalist
Polka NodeJS Minimalist
Sails NodeJS Robust
Nest NodeJS/TS Robust
FoatTS NodeJS/TS Robust
AdonisJS NodeJS Robust
Meteor NodeJS Robust
Loopback NodeJS Robust
Hapi NodeJS Minimalist
Derby NodeJS Robust
Total NodeJS Robust
Oak DenoJS Minimalist
Pogo DenoJS Minimalist
Laravel PHP Robust
Slim PHP Minimalist
Django Python Robust
Flask Python Minimalist
FastAPI Python Minimalist
Pyramid Python Robust
Bottle Python Minimalist
CherryPy Python Minimalist
Web2Py Python Robust
Falcon Python Minimalist
TurboGears Python Robust
Rails Ruby Robust
Sinatra Ruby Minimalist
Hanami Ruby Robust
Grape Ruby Minimalist
Buffalo Go Robust
Revel Go Minimalist
Mux Go Minimalist
Echo Go Minimalist
Rocket Rust Robust
Actix Rust Robust
Warp Rust Minimalist
Nickel Rust Minimalist
Luminous Clojure Minimalist
Phoenix Elixir Robust
Chicago Boss Erlang/Elixir Robust
Nitrogen Erlang Minimalist
Zotonic Erlang Robust
Amber Crystal Robust
Kemal Crystal Minimalist
Lucky Crystal Robust
Jester Nim Minimalist
Spring Java/Kotlin Robust
kTor Kotlin Minimalist
Javalin Kotlin Minimalist
Play Java/Scala Robust
Grails Java/Groovy Robust
Vapor Swift Minimalist
Kitura Swift Minimalist
Criollo Objective-C/Swift Minimalist
Aqueduct Dart Robust
Angel Dart Robust
Rikulo Dart Robust
IHP Haskell Robust
Obelisk Haskell Robust
ASP.NET C#/F#/VB.net Robust
Tinkerbell Haxe Minimalist
Treefrog C++ Robust
Wt C++ Robust
Kore C Minimalist
facil.io C Minimalist
sph-web-app Scheme Minimalist
Catapault Scheme Minimalist
Catalyst Perl Robust
Mojolicious Perl Minimalist
Dancer Perl Minimalist
Cro Raku Minimalist

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Top comments (7)

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bschandramohan profile image
bschandramohan

Good List. Curious to hear why you call these backend web frameworks and not just web frameworks.
As soon as I see backend frameworks, I expected to some forms of spring boot but then realized these are all pointing to web frameworks.

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alexmercedcoder profile image
Alex Merced

I generally think of any framework that enables me to create an API among other things a backend framework vs frontend frameworks I generally think UI Frameworks Like React/Angular, Component Frameworks like Shoelace, or CSS Frameworks like Bootstrap/Materialize.

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lexiebkm profile image
Alexander B.K.

As for Go, currently I focus on Gin, although there are several other interesting ones which are not mentioned here such as : Iris, Fiber, Beego and Gorilla. I am also waiting for Confetti :
confetti-framework.com/docs/get-st...
to get complete with additional features such as session, database and authentication, because it is heavily influenced by Laravel that provides those useful features.

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lexiebkm profile image
Alexander B.K.

Nice list. Maybe I am not really serious with using C/C++ for web backend. But I want to
try it. I expect it can generate its own HTTP server like Node.js or Golang with its built-in net/http package.
Seeing that Golang provides built-in net/http package, I wish C/C++ community would provide similar library too.
So, I am glad seeing several backend frameworks for C/C++ in the list. I will take time to have look on them soon.

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raigaurav profile image
Gaurav Rai • Edited

Just some inputs for Perl -

  1. Mojolicious is a Robust framework. It also support minimalist approach.
  2. 'Dancer' is original version of Dancer, which is now in maintenance mode. Advised to use Dancer2 for newly-started apps.
  3. Some more frameworks -

    a. Kelp - metacpan.org/pod/Kelp
    b. RapidApp (Built on top of Catalyst) - metacpan.org/pod/RapidApp
    c. Raisin (inspired by Ruby Grape)- metacpan.org/pod/Raisin

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alexmercedcoder profile image
Alex Merced

Thank you!

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lexiebkm profile image
Alexander B.K.

I see Deno here, too. Have you used it in production ? Tell me a bit about your experience on using Deno, because I am still waiting for its wide acceptance.