Why We Ditched Node for Bun in 2026 (And Why You Should Too)

For years the JavaScript ecosystem felt like a settled landscape, Node was the undisputed king, Deno was the academic alternative, and "speed" was something we just accepted as "fast enough"

But as we hit 2026, the baseline has shifted. We recently completed a full migration from Node to Bun for our all our repos. What started as an experiment ended as a permanent shift in our engineering culture.

Here is why we made the leap and why 2026 is the year you should leave node_modules headaches behind.

1. The Death of the Toolchain Sprawl

In the Node world, starting a project meant an immediate tax of configuration. You needed npm for packages, tsc for TypeScript, jest or vitest for testing, and webpack or esbuild for bundling.

Bun is a single binary that does all of it.
By switching to Bun, we deleted hundreds of lines of configuration files.

Native TypeScript: We no longer use ts-node or tsx. Bun runs .ts files out of the box.
Unified Tooling: bun test is up to 20x faster than Jest and built-in. No more waiting 30 seconds for a test suite to initialize.

2. ElysiaJS: The Bun Backend Framework

The biggest catalyst for our migration was choosing ElysiaJS as our main backend framework.

Elysia is a Bun-first framework designed specifically to leverage Bun's low-level performance. Since it’s optimized for the JavaScriptCore engine, the throughput is staggering.

End-to-End Type Safety: With Elysia and Bun, types flow from the server to the client (via Eden Treaty) automatically. No more manual type synchronization!!

The Speed Gap: In our benchmarks, Elysia on Bun handled over 250,000 requests/sec, making our old Express/Node services look like they were running in slow motion.

Zero Overhead: Because Elysia is built on Web Standard APIs (Fetch, Request, Response), there is zero "framework tax."

"With Bun + Elysia, we finally reached the 'Single Binary' dream. Our backend is now just one tool that handles everything from the database driver to the HTTP server."

3. Performance That Actually Saves Money

Benchmarks are one thing; cloud bills are another..
In 2026, with the rise of edge computing and serverless architectures, startup time is currency.

Metric	Node.js (v23+)	Bun (v1.3+)
Cold Startup	~150ms	~40ms
HTTP Requests/sec	~90k	~125k
Idle Memory	~95MB	~65MB

By switching our serverless functions to Bun, we reduced our execution duration by 35%, directly lowering our AWS Lambda costs. Bun’s use of the JavaScriptCore (JSC) engine—the same tech powering Safari—prioritizes rapid start times over the heavy JIT (Just-In-Time) optimization overhead of Node's V8.

4. "Bun Install" is the New Standard

If you’ve ever waited 2 minutes for npm install, yarn install, or even pnpm install to finish on a CI/CD pipeline, you know the pain. Bun’s package manager is roughly 20x to 40x faster than npm. It uses a binary lockfile (bun.lockb) and global caching that makes dependency installation feel instantaneous.

This is the real deal, the speed diff is no joke here

For our team, this meant our CI/CD pipelines went from 30-minute builds to under 5 minutes for our big monorepos.

5. The 2026 Reality: Compatibility is No Longer an Issue

The biggest argument against Bun in 2024 was "it doesn't support all npm packages." By 2026, that argument is dead. Bun now supports >95% of Node APIs, including complex native modules like buffer, fs, and path.

Following its acquisition by Anthropic, Bun has reached a level of enterprise stability we hadn't seen before. It’s no longer just for "side projects"; it’s powering production-grade AI agents and high-concurrency APIs globally.

How to Start Your Migration

You don't have to rewrite your whole app overnight. Start where we did:

Swap your Package Manager: Run bun install in your Node project. It’s a drop-in replacement.
Run your Tests: Try bun test. You'll see the speed difference immediately.
Migrate Scripts: Change node index.js to bun index.ts in your package.json.

My Personal Thoughts..

Node isn't "bad" but in 2026 it feels like using a heavy manual typewriter in a world of high-speed digital keyboards..
Bun offers the performance, the developer experience, and the cost-savings that modern full-stack development demands.

For the geeks reading this who want to see the cold, hard numbers:

Node vs Deno vs Bun: Performance & JavaScript runtime comparison

This video provides a deep dive into 2026 performance benchmarks to help you visualize the raw speed differences between these runtimes.