Next.js is the framework that handles everything React doesn't: routing, server-side rendering, API endpoints, image optimization, and deployment. It's the default choice for React apps, and for good reason: it works out of the box and scales from a landing page to a full SaaS.
Everything is free and open source under MIT. Vercel (the company behind it) makes money on hosting, not the framework. You can deploy Next.js anywhere: Vercel, AWS, a Docker container, a VPS. No features are locked to Vercel's platform.
The catch: Next.js has gotten complex. App Router vs Pages Router, Server Components, Server Actions, caching layers, middleware. The mental model is heavier than it was in 2020. And while you CAN deploy anywhere, the best experience is on Vercel, which creates soft lock-in. Self-hosting means handling things Vercel automates: image optimization, ISR, edge functions. It works, but you'll feel the gaps.
FastAPI builds Python APIs with automatic OpenAPI documentation, request validation, and async support, running significantly faster than Flask or Django REST. You write Python functions with type hints, and FastAPI generates a validated API with interactive Swagger docs. What would take 200 lines in Flask takes 40 in FastAPI.
Everything is free under MIT. No paid tier, no cloud, no enterprise version. It's a framework: you install it with pip and build on it. The ecosystem (Pydantic for validation, Uvicorn for serving, SQLAlchemy for database) is also entirely free.
The catch: FastAPI is fantastic for APIs but it's not a full web framework. No built-in admin panel, no ORM, no template rendering (well, it has Jinja2 support, but that's not the point). If you need a full web application framework with batteries included, Django is still the answer. FastAPI is best when your Python code serves data to a separate frontend.
Godot Engine is a full game engine for 2D, 3D, mobile, desktop, web, and consoles, completely free with no revenue share or per-seat licensing. It's a web framework: you define routes, attach handlers, add middleware for things like logging and auth, and it handles the HTTP plumbing.
MIT license. Gin is to Go what Express is to Node.js, the default answer when someone asks "which framework?" It's fast (built on httprouter), has a clean API, and the documentation is solid. You can go from zero to a working API in 20 minutes.
Everything is free. No paid tier, no commercial version, no cloud offering. It's a library you import into your Go project.
The catch: Gin is showing its age. The Go ecosystem has moved toward lighter frameworks like Echo and Chi, or even just the standard library's net/http with Go 1.22's improved routing. Gin adds convenience but also adds a dependency, and in Go culture, fewer dependencies is better. If you're starting a new project today, look at Hono (for the edge) or the standard library first. Gin is fine, battle-tested, and everywhere, but it's not the only answer anymore.
Batteries included, and the batteries are good.
Instagram, Pinterest, and Disqus run on Django. It's been battle-tested for 20 years. The ORM, the admin interface, the migration system, the security middleware, these are mature, well-documented, and they work together cleanly. Completely free. BSD license. Maintained by the Django Software Foundation, funded by donations.
Solo developers: Django gets you from idea to working app faster than almost anything else. The admin panel alone saves weeks of building CRUD interfaces. Small to large teams benefit from Django's "one obvious way to do it" philosophy, less bikeshedding, more shipping.
The catch: Django is synchronous by default. Async support exists but it's not natural yet. If you're building a high-concurrency API, FastAPI or Go might serve you better. And Django's monolithic architecture means you're carrying the full framework even if you only need 20% of it.
Svelte compiles your components into vanilla JavaScript at build time, no virtual DOM, no runtime overhead. You write components that look like HTML with superpowers, and the compiler turns them into the smallest, fastest code possible.
MIT, one of the most loved frameworks in every developer survey. SvelteKit (the full-stack framework built on Svelte) handles routing, SSR, and deployment. The developer experience is excellent: less boilerplate, more readable code, faster sites.
Fully free. No paid tier, no enterprise edition. Deploy anywhere.
The catch: the ecosystem is smaller than React's. If you need a specific UI component library, authentication wrapper, or enterprise integration, React probably has 10 options where Svelte has 2. Job market is also thinner. Fewer companies hiring for Svelte means fewer Stack Overflow answers when you're stuck.
Eloquent ORM, Blade templates, queue workers, authentication scaffolding, and the most elegant routing syntax in any web framework. Period.
The most popular PHP framework by a wide margin. Laravel single-handedly kept PHP relevant for a new generation of developers. The ecosystem is staggering: Forge for server management, Vapor for serverless, Nova for admin panels, Horizon for queue monitoring.
The framework is free (MIT). The ecosystem products are paid: Forge ($12/mo), Nova ($99/site), Vapor ($39/mo). You don't need any of them to use Laravel. Solo developers: Laravel + a $5 VPS is one of the cheapest ways to ship a production web app. Small teams benefit from the convention-heavy approach. Larger teams get the mature ecosystem they need.
The catch: it's PHP. That carries hiring stigma in some circles, even though modern PHP (8.3+) is good. And the paid ecosystem products, while optional, are so good that you'll feel their absence if you don't pay. Forge at $12/mo for deployment is hard to say no to.
Spring Boot is the framework that makes Spring actually usable. It takes the notoriously complex Spring Framework and gives you sensible defaults, auto-configuration, and embedded servers so you can go from zero to running API in minutes.
Used by a huge chunk of enterprise Java. You get dependency injection, web servers, database access, security, messaging, and basically every integration you can think of, all through starter dependencies that just work. The ecosystem is unmatched in the Java world.
Completely free. Apache 2.0 license. VMware (now Broadcom) maintains it but the framework itself costs nothing. Solo developers: if you're choosing Java, Spring Boot is the default choice. Small to large teams: same thing. The hiring pool is enormous because everyone knows Spring Boot.
The catch: it's Java. Startup times and memory usage are higher than Go or Node. And Spring's "magic" (auto-configuration, annotation processing) means when something goes wrong, debugging can feel like archaeology. The abstraction layers run deep.
NestJS brings structure to backend TypeScript with dependency injection, modules, guards, and interceptors. Basically, Angular's architecture applied to the server side.
Everything is free under MIT. The framework, CLI, all modules (GraphQL, WebSockets, microservices, CQRS), all open source. NestJS makes money through enterprise support and training, not feature gating.
The catch: the learning curve is real. If you're coming from Express, the decorators, dependency injection, and module system feel over-engineered for simple APIs. NestJS shines when your API has 50+ endpoints with complex business logic. For a simple CRUD API, it's a cannon for a mosquito. And the decorator-heavy style means your code is deeply coupled to NestJS conventions. Migrating away is not trivial.
0, JWT management, role-based access control, and secure token storage. It gives you routing, middleware, and request handling with minimal opinions about how you structure everything else. MIT license, the most-used Node.js framework by a wide margin.
Express doesn't do much on its own. That's the point. You pick your database, your template engine, your auth strategy, your validation library. It just handles HTTP and gets out of the way. The middleware ecosystem is enormous. Passport for auth, helmet for security headers, cors, body-parser, thousands more.
Fully free. No paid tier, no hosted version, no premium features. It's a 600KB dependency in your package.json. Solo through enterprise, Express works at every scale. The catch is that at scale, 'unopinionated' becomes 'you built a custom framework without realizing it.' Every Express app over a certain size is basically a bespoke framework.
The catch: Express is showing its age. It's callback-based at its core (async/await works but isn't native). Newer frameworks like Hono, Fastify, and Elysia are faster, have better TypeScript support, and were designed for modern JS. Express 5 has been in beta since 2014. If you're starting a new project, look at the alternatives. If you're maintaining an existing Express app, it still works fine.
Astro ships zero JavaScript by default, which makes it the right framework for content-heavy sites (blogs, docs, marketing pages, portfolios) where shipping 300KB of JS for mostly-text pages is absurd. It renders everything to static HTML by default and only sends JavaScript for the components that actually need interactivity. Your pages load instantly.
Everything is free under a permissive license. The framework, the build tool, content collections, MDX support, image optimization. All included. Astro makes money through their hosting platform (Astro Studio), not the framework.
The catch: Astro is opinionated about content sites. If you're building a highly interactive dashboard or a real-time app, you'll fight the framework. It CAN do client-side interactivity (it supports React, Vue, Svelte components), but it's designed to minimize it. And the 'island architecture' (where interactive components are isolated), requires a mental shift if you're used to full-page React apps.
Ruby on Rails is the framework that proved one developer can build what used to take a team. It gives you everything out of the box: database ORM, routing, views, email, background jobs, WebSockets, API mode. You generate a scaffold and you have a working CRUD app in minutes.
MIT license, created by DHH in 2004 and still actively developed. Shopify, GitHub, Basecamp, and thousands of startups run on Rails. It prioritizes developer happiness and convention over configuration, which means less decision fatigue, but also less flexibility.
Fully free. No paid tier, no commercial version, no strings. You deploy it anywhere: Heroku, Render, Fly.io, a $5 VPS, AWS. The ecosystem of gems (plugins) is massive and mature.
The catch: Ruby is slower than Go, Rust, or even Node.js for raw throughput. Rails apps can get monolithic and hard to maintain at scale without discipline. The job market for Rails developers has shrunk compared to JavaScript/Python frameworks. And "convention over configuration" means when you need to do something unconventional, Rails fights you.
Zustand manages React state in about 5 lines of code: no boilerplate, no providers, no reducers, no actions. Create a store, use the hook, done. Your state updates, your component re-renders, nothing else does.
MIT licensed. The API is tiny: create and useStore. That's basically it. It handles async actions naturally (just use async/await in your store), works outside React (vanilla JS), supports middleware (persist to localStorage, devtools, immer), and plays nicely with React's concurrent features.
Fully free. No paid tier. No cloud. No enterprise version. This is a community library maintained by the pmndrs collective (same folks behind Three.js React bindings). Bundle size is ~1KB gzipped. Compare that to Redux Toolkit at ~12KB. If your state needs are simple to moderate: theme, auth, UI state, API cache, Zustand is the right call.
The catch: for very large apps with complex state relationships, Redux's structure (enforced patterns, middleware chain, devtools ecosystem) can be an advantage. Zustand's simplicity means you define your own patterns, which is freedom for experienced devs and rope for beginners.
Requests is the library that makes it not painful. Python's built-in urllib works but reads like a punishment. Requests gives you `requests.get(url)` and you're done. It handles sessions, cookies, authentication, file uploads, redirects, and SSL verification with an API so clean it became the template for how Python libraries should be designed.
Fully free under Apache 2.0. It's one of the most downloaded Python packages in existence, over 300 million downloads per month. No paid tier, no hosted anything. Install it and use it.
The catch: requests is synchronous. If you're making hundreds of concurrent API calls, it blocks. For async HTTP, use httpx (which has an API almost identical to requests but supports async/await). requests also doesn't support HTTP/2. For most use cases, neither limitation matters. But if performance is critical, httpx is the modern successor that does everything requests does plus async and HTTP/2.
Fiber is a Go web framework modeled after Express.js, built on fasthttp for high throughput. Routes, middleware, static files, template rendering, all with Express-like syntax but running on Go's fasthttp library instead of Node.js. It's consistently one of the fastest web frameworks in benchmarks.
The pitch is simple: Go's performance with an API that JavaScript developers already understand. If you're moving from Node to Go and don't want to learn a completely new routing paradigm, Fiber's learning curve is almost flat.
MIT. Fully free, no paid tier, no cloud service, no commercial edition.
The catch: Fiber uses fasthttp instead of Go's standard net/http library. That means some Go middleware and libraries that expect net/http won't work without adapters. The Go community has opinions about this; many prefer Chi or Echo because they stick to the standard library. If you care about long-term compatibility with the Go ecosystem, the fasthttp dependency is a real trade-off.
SolidJS delivers fine-grained reactivity and smaller bundles by compiling to surgical DOM updates. It looks like React (JSX, components, hooks-like primitives) but compiles down to direct DOM updates. No diffing, no reconciliation, no wasted renders.
MIT licensed. The framework consistently tops JavaScript framework benchmarks. Bundle sizes start around 7KB gzipped. It uses signals for reactivity: when a value changes, only the exact DOM node that uses it updates. Nothing else re-renders.
SolidJS itself is fully free. The pricing page is for SolidStart (their meta-framework, like Next.js is to React) and SolidCloud, but SolidJS the library costs nothing. The ecosystem is smaller than React's. Fewer component libraries, fewer tutorials, fewer Stack Overflow answers. But it's growing steadily with an active Discord and an enthusiastic community.
The catch: you're betting on a smaller ecosystem. Hiring Solid developers is harder than hiring React developers. Some React patterns don't translate (early returns in components break reactivity, destructuring props loses tracking). The mental model is subtly different even though the syntax looks familiar.
Remix leans into web standards (forms, HTTP caching, URL-based routing) instead of inventing its own abstractions. It's React-based but treats the server as a first-class citizen, not an afterthought.
Fully free under MIT. No paid tier, no cloud service. Remix was acquired by Shopify, which funds development. The framework itself has no monetization. There's nothing to host: it's a framework you build with. Deploys anywhere: Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, Fly.io, Node.js servers, Deno. The adapter system means you're not locked to any platform.
Solo developers: Remix is a great choice if you like working with web fundamentals. The mental model is simpler than Next.js in many ways: data loading is per-route, mutations use forms, errors have boundaries. Small to large teams: the nested routing and data loading patterns scale well.
The catch: Remix merged with React Router v7 in late 2024, which confused the ecosystem. The project is stable and actively maintained, but the branding transition means some docs and tutorials reference the old structure. Also, Next.js has a much larger ecosystem of examples, templates, and third-party integrations.
Routing, middleware, request binding, validation, and template rendering. That's it. No ORM, no migration tool, no opinions about your database.
MIT license. The benchmarks put Echo among the fastest Go web frameworks. Optimized router using a radix tree, automatic TLS via Let's Encrypt, HTTP/2 support, and a middleware ecosystem (CORS, JWT, logging, rate limiting, gzip) that covers the common needs.
Fully free. No paid tier, no hosted version. A Go module you import. Every team size: free. Echo's performance means you rarely think about framework overhead; your bottleneck will be your business logic or database, not the HTTP layer.
The catch: Go's web framework landscape is crowded. Gin has more stars (83K) and a larger community. Fiber (which uses Fasthttp instead of net/http) benchmarks even faster. Chi is closer to the standard library. Echo sits in a comfortable middle: more batteries than Chi, less middleware than Gin, standard net/http under the hood. The choice between Echo, Gin, and Chi mostly comes down to API preference. If you're new to Go web frameworks, Gin's larger community means more tutorials and StackOverflow answers.
Think Express.js but 10x smaller, 10x faster, and it deploys to any JavaScript runtime without code changes.
What's free: Everything. MIT license. The entire framework, all middleware, all adapters. No paid anything.
Hono's sweet spot is edge computing and serverless. At ~14KB, it starts faster than most frameworks can parse their config files. The API is Express-like (get, post, middleware) so the learning curve is nearly flat if you know Express. TypeScript-first with great type inference. The middleware ecosystem covers JWT auth, CORS, compression, rate limiting, and more.
The catch: Hono is a backend/API framework, not a full-stack solution. No built-in SSR, no file-based routing (without a plugin), no database ORM. If you need a full-stack framework, look at Next.js or Remix. And while 'runs everywhere' is the pitch, the edge runtime restrictions (no Node.js APIs, limited filesystem access) still apply. You're writing for Web Standards, which means some npm packages won't work.
Phoenix is a web framework built on Elixir and the Erlang VM, the same system that powers telecom infrastructure handling millions of connections, perfect for real-time dashboards, chat, and live updates. Plain terms: it's a web framework like Rails or Django, but built for apps where lots of users are connected at once.
MIT license, Elixir. LiveView is the headline feature: it lets you build interactive, real-time UIs without writing JavaScript. Your server renders HTML, pushes diffs over a WebSocket, and the page updates instantly. For dashboards, admin panels, and collaborative tools, it eliminates an entire frontend build step.
Fully free. No paid tier, no hosted offering, no premium features. The entire framework, including LiveView, is open source. Solo developers: great if you're willing to learn Elixir. Small to large teams: Phoenix scales beautifully, but hiring Elixir developers is hard. The talent pool is a fraction of Ruby, Python, or JavaScript.
The catch: Elixir. The language is excellent, but the ecosystem is smaller than Node or Python. Fewer libraries, fewer tutorials, fewer Stack Overflow answers. If your team doesn't already know Elixir, the learning curve is real, and convincing your company to adopt it is a harder sell than the framework deserves.
No framework magic, no custom context objects, no lock-in. Your handlers are regular `http.HandlerFunc`; Chi just routes requests to them and gives you middleware chaining.
Go, MIT. The middleware system is Chi's best feature: compose authentication, logging, rate limiting, CORS, and compression as a stack. The built-in middleware collection covers the common cases. Route groups let you apply different middleware to different URL prefixes.
Fully free. No paid tier, no hosted version. It's a Go package: `go get github.com/go-chi/chi`. Solo to large teams: free. Chi is what you use when you want the thinnest possible layer between your code and Go's HTTP server. It adds routing and middleware composition, nothing more.
The catch: Chi does routing. That's it. No ORM, no template engine, no config management, no migration tools. If you're coming from Express.js, Django, or Rails and expect a full framework, Chi isn't one. You'll assemble everything else yourself, which is the Go way, but it means more decisions upfront. And if you're comparing HTTP routers specifically, Go 1.22+'s standard library mux now supports method-based routing and path parameters, narrowing Chi's advantage for simple APIs.
Qwik takes a fundamentally different approach to JavaScript delivery, making pages fast by default (not 'fast for a React app'). Instead of sending all your JS upfront and hydrating the page, Qwik sends near-zero JS on initial load and only downloads the code for a button when you actually click it.
What's free: Everything. MIT license. The framework, the optimizer, the Qwik City meta-framework for routing and data loading. All free.
The 'resumability' concept is innovative. Traditional frameworks (React, Next.js, Svelte) ship JavaScript, then re-execute it on the client to make the page interactive. Qwik serializes the app state into HTML and resumes exactly where the server left off. The result: near-instant interactivity regardless of app size.
The catch: the ecosystem is tiny compared to React or even Svelte. Finding Qwik developers is hard. Third-party component libraries are scarce. If you need a rich component ecosystem, you'll be building a lot from scratch. And the mental model (lazy-loading everything, dollar-sign functions, serialization boundaries) takes real adjustment even for experienced developers.
Jotai strips React state management back to the basics: atoms that hold values and update components, nothing more. You create atoms (small pieces of state), use them in components, and React re-renders only what changed. That's it.
Think of atoms like individual useState hooks that any component in your app can read and write to. No providers wrapping your entire app, no boilerplate. You write `const countAtom = atom(0)` and use it anywhere. Derived state is just an atom that reads other atoms.
What makes Jotai different from Zustand (its sibling from the same team): Jotai is bottom-up. You build small atoms and compose them. Zustand is top-down: one store with slices. For apps with lots of independent pieces of state that occasionally depend on each other, Jotai's model clicks faster. Async atoms handle data fetching without extra libraries. Integration with React Suspense works out of the box. TypeScript support is excellent.
The catch: the ecosystem is smaller than Redux or Zustand. If your team already knows Redux, switching saves zero time. And for simple apps, useState plus context is still fine; Jotai shines when you have 20+ pieces of interconnected state.
We're talking handling more requests per second than most Go and Rust web frameworks, in TypeScript.
The developer experience is the other selling point. End-to-end type safety. Define your API once and the types flow from server to client automatically. Validation, OpenAPI docs, and auth plugins built in. The API feels modern in a way that Express and Fastify don't.
MIT. The Bun ecosystem's answer to Express.
The catch: it requires Bun. If your deployment target is Node.js, Lambda, or Cloudflare Workers, Elysia won't work. Bun adoption is growing but it's not Node-level ubiquitous yet. The ecosystem of middleware and plugins is smaller than Express (thousands of packages) or even Fastify. And 'fastest benchmarks' matter less than you think in production where your database query takes 100x longer than framework overhead.
Frappe is a full-stack Python web framework built for business apps. If you need forms, workflows, user roles, email, and a REST API without stitching together a dozen packages, this gives you all of it out of the box. The framework is MIT-licensed and completely free.
Self-hosting runs on Docker via the frappe_docker repo. You will need MariaDB (default) or Postgres, Redis, and the Bench CLI tool to manage sites. The setup is well-documented but not trivial. Expect a few hours to get production-ready, and ongoing maintenance for upgrades. The metadata-driven architecture (everything is a "DocType") means fast development but deep coupling to the Frappe ecosystem.
Solo developers and small teams can run this for free indefinitely. If you want managed hosting, Frappe Cloud handles installs, upgrades, and monitoring for a fee. ERPNext, accounting, HR, and helpdesk apps are all built on this framework, so you are betting on an ecosystem with real production users, not a weekend project.
The catch: once you go deep on DocTypes and Frappe's conventions, you are locked into their way of doing things. This is not Django with extra batteries. It is its own world. If your app outgrows the framework's opinions, migrating off is painful.
Actionhero is a Node.js framework for building API servers with integrated task processing. It's a batteries-included approach for building APIs that also need to do work in the background. Apache 2.0, TypeScript. Built around the concept of 'actions' (API endpoints), 'tasks' (background jobs), and 'initializers' (startup logic). Supports HTTP, WebSocket, and TCP connections in one server. Uses Redis for clustering and task queuing.
Fully free. No paid tier, no hosted version. It's a framework you install and build on. The honest take: ActionHero fills a real gap, the 'I need an API server AND background jobs AND WebSockets in one process' problem. But the community is quiet. That matters when you hit a bug and need help.
Solo developers building something that needs all three capabilities: worth trying. Teams: the small community and sparse ecosystem make it a harder sell when NestJS or Fastify + BullMQ get you the same result with much larger communities.
The catch: the community is tiny compared to Express, NestJS, or Hono. Documentation exists but examples are limited. If you need WebSockets + background jobs, you're probably better off composing dedicated tools (Hono + BullMQ + Socket.io) unless you strongly prefer the all-in-one approach.
