On 24th of March 2026, the TechEmpower Framework Bechmarks have been discontinued, with their GitHub repository now in archived mode.
The Start
The first round of the TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks dates back to March 2013, covering only as much as 25 different frameworks. Within the following years, all major HTTP web framework implementations where added through contributions to their public GitHub repository, making the project an important litmus test for the performance characteristics of HTTP webservers and application development frameworks. In the most recent Round 23 from February 2025, more than 330 framework implementations were covered.
As it got more and more traction, having good results became a top priority for framework developers for their new software releases. In round 13, Microsoft started to sponsor the project with hardware and used their now first position in the benchmarks to fuel their marketing for ASP.NET Core. Overall, the benchmark's sole existence lead to way faster frameworks for all of us.
The Decline
Although results have continued to be published once a year, there have been virtually no changes or updates to the underlying test platform in recent years. High performance frameworks were capped in plaintext at roughly 30 milion requests per second, due to a combination of wrk and large request headers being sent by the tests. Even though framework developers adressed such points, the maintainers of TechEmpower did not show much effort to improve those points.
Additionally, the maintainers allowed frameworks to use low-level tricks to get the most out of their framework, causing the results to reflect more a socket benchmark then actual real-life implementations used by end-users. In this regard, the results currently shown are highly missleading and do not reflect typical use cases such as providing a high performance REST API. A large number of "frameworks" listed in the current round would probably even fail basic compliance tests, so they only exist to be shown within the framerwork results in the first place.
After all, people interested in improving the platform got the impression that the benchmarks are no longer a priority by TechEmpower, and rightly so as the project is now archived.
The Future
Besides TechEmpower FrameworkBenchmarks, there was not much competition - there are the Web Framework Benchmarks, but they are nowhere comparable to the level of detail shown by the FrameworkBenchmarks from TechEmpower.
A few months ago, a new project, HttpArena, was started to adress the pain points with TechEmpower FrameworkBenchmarks. They show a large variety of benchmarks, include new technologies such as HTTP/2 or websockets and have most of the major frameworks already covered. In contrast to FrameworkBenchmarks, they run benchmarks within the created PRs as well as when PRs are merged, giving developers feedback way faster. On top, they promise to keep the framework implementations realistic, so the results should be more credible than those of the FrameworkBenchmarks, making them a better tool for developers and architects deciding on technology.
Conclusion
TechEmpower FrameworkBenchmarks did an amazing job in making performance of web frameworks visible, and caused the overall performance of those frameworks to be greatly improved through their transparent results.
We will see, whether HttpArena or any other platform will continue this work, important for the web today and in the future.
Cover picture by Julian Hochgesang
Top comments (3)
Thankful to the TechEmpower team for the past decade of dedication. Excited for maybe a new platform stepping up and changing the game!
Covering gRPC is very interesting, tls or h2c?
Both, unary