A low-overhead, schema-driven Node.js HTTP framework that's measurably faster than Express — built for serious production APIs.
Fastify is a Node.js HTTP framework focused on developer experience, low overhead, and performance. It is significantly faster than Express in benchmarks, has a built-in JSON schema validator (with TypeScript type generation), a powerful plugin system, and a logger (Pino) that's one of the fastest in Node. The framework feels like Express if Express were written today: same routing model, same middleware-style hooks, but with schemas as a first-class concept. You define a JSON schema for your route's body, params, querystring, and response, and Fastify validates, serializes, and (with `fastify-type-provider-typescript`) generates types for you automatically. The ecosystem is mature: official plugins for CORS, helmet, JWT, auth, multipart, WebSockets, rate limiting, caching, and Postgres/Redis/MongoDB/MariaDB/MySQL. For teams that want an Express-like DX with better performance and types, Fastify is the obvious choice in 2026.
Define request and response schemas once — Fastify validates, serializes, and types them.
Encapsulated plugins with their own context — clean composition for large apps.
Built-in fast structured logger — JSON to stdout, ready for any log aggregator.
`fastify-type-provider-typescript` generates route types from the schema automatically.
2-3x faster than Express on most workloads; very close to Bun in raw throughput.
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