actix-web VS axum

Compare actix-web vs axum and see what are their differences.

actix-web

Actix Web is a powerful, pragmatic, and extremely fast web framework for Rust. (by actix)

axum

Ergonomic and modular web framework built with Tokio, Tower, and Hyper (by tokio-rs)
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actix-web axum
180 159
22,422 20,433
1.7% 2.7%
9.2 9.5
7 days ago 10 days ago
Rust Rust
Apache License 2.0 MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

actix-web

Posts with mentions or reviews of actix-web. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-01-20.
  • Rusty Backends
    9 projects | dev.to | 20 Jan 2025
    To find answers, we wanted to get our hands dirty with three popular Rust web frameworks including rocket, axum, and actix, and get a feeling for their performance, features, and most importantly the developer experience.
  • Show HN: PDF2MD – Rust+Redis+ClickHouse+VLLM conversion pipeline for PDFs
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Nov 2024
  • Actix Web - The Rust Framework for Web Development - Hello World
    1 project | dev.to | 5 Nov 2024
    Actix Web site: https://actix.rs/
  • A recap about the Zentrox development
    4 projects | dev.to | 28 Sep 2024
    So, what framework do I use? Zentrox uses the actix_web framework which is a great library. My DevExp. with this tool was nice. It has good documentation and powerful tools. It was easy to implement for me as I was previously using Express.JS and Flask (Python). Actix also has other helper libraries for files, cookies, sessions,... which I use in my project as well.
  • Show HN: Hosting my website using my own C web server
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Sep 2024
    Not to compare but i realice this is something you can do with rust with few lines

    https://github.com/actix/actix-web/tree/master/actix-http

  • Understanding AML/KYC: a light primer for engineers
    8 projects | dev.to | 18 Jul 2024
    APIs are often the key to enabling interoperability between AML/KYC solutions and other systems. Design APIs following RESTful principles—using libraries like ExpressJs (JavaScript), Flask (Python), or Actix Web (Rust)—ensuring they are stateless and support the JSON/XML formats expected by most systems. Use Swagger to generate detailed documentation for RESTful APIs to facilitate integration and ensure your APIs are easily consumable by other systems. If you’re building GraphQL APIs, using tools like Apollo Server, Prisma, or Graphene will allow for self-documenting APIs (through GraphQL introspection).
  • Actix-Web: v4.8.0
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Jun 2024
  • Actix-Web: v4.6.0
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 23 May 2024
  • Empowering Web Privacy with Rust: Building a Decentralized Identity Management System
    3 projects | dev.to | 9 Apr 2024
    Actix Web Documentation: Detailed documentation on using Actix-web, including examples and best practices for building web applications with Rust.
  • Ntex: Powerful, pragmatic, fast framework for composable networking services
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Mar 2024
    I can't speak to the "is it any good" part, but (after a bit of research) I can share what I've found. I'll try to represent things as best as I understand, but I may have some finer details mixed up.

    ntex is written by the same person that started actix-web, Nikolay Kim (fafhrd91 on GitHub). There was a bunch of drama a while back due to actix-web using (what many reasoned to be) avoidable unsafe code, which was later found to be buggy. Nikolay was pilloried online, resulting in him transferring leadership of actix-web to someone else. ntex is, as I understand it, essentially Nikolay picking back up on his ideals for what could have been actix-web, if people hadn't pushed him out of his own project.

    How ntex compares to the pre-/post-leadership change of actix-web, I don't know.

    Here are some jumping points if you want more of the backstory.

    https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/21/rust_actix_web_framew...

    https://steveklabnik.com/writing/a-sad-day-for-rust

    https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/1289

axum

Posts with mentions or reviews of axum. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-01-20.
  • Rusty Backends
    9 projects | dev.to | 20 Jan 2025
    To find answers, we wanted to get our hands dirty with three popular Rust web frameworks including rocket, axum, and actix, and get a feeling for their performance, features, and most importantly the developer experience.
  • Axum 0.8.0
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jan 2025
    I really hope guide-level docs are on the roadmap for Axum. The current situation of "here are some (third-party) blog posts"[0] is not greatly encouraging.

    [0]: https://github.com/tokio-rs/axum/blob/main/ECOSYSTEM.md#tuto...

  • Web framework Axum v0.8.0 (rust)
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jan 2025
  • Step-by-Step Guide to Server-Side Render React with Rust
    6 projects | dev.to | 2 Dec 2024
    For this example, we will use axum, a web framework that works on top of tokio.
  • How to Deploy Your Rig App on AWS Lambda: A Step-by-Step Guide
    7 projects | dev.to | 1 Nov 2024
    If your lambda handles multiple endpoints of your API, the crate axum facilitates the routing within the lambda.
  • Using Polars in Rust for high-performance data analysis
    9 projects | dev.to | 30 Oct 2024
    We’ll use Axum with Tokio to build a web backend, Tracing for logging, and Serde for serialization and deserialization.
  • Replacing Nginx with Axum
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Oct 2024
    After I read a bit about axum [1], it says it's a relatively thin wrapper on top of hyper [2], a fast and correct HTTP library.

    In other words, what can be done with NGINX, it can be achieved with axum (assuming you know Rust).

    It looks interesting, I'm not going to lie!

    [1] https://github.com/tokio-rs/axum

    [2] https://crates.io/crates/hyper

  • Declarative macro magic from Axum in Rust
    3 projects | dev.to | 9 Oct 2024
    If you are familiar with API development in Rust, you may recognize this syntax from Axum. This puzzling question piqued my curiosity and led me to build Cairo, where I re-implemented some key Axum concepts in a simpler way as a learning exercise. I’ve long been fascinated by the intermediate + advanced concepts library authors employ to make their interfaces feel frictionless. Rust sits in a brilliant space because of the way it melds high-level expressiveness with low-level control and performance. One of the ways it accomplishes this is using macros.
  • Axum/Tera & Real Shortcodes in Rust: A WordPress-Like Implementation
    1 project | dev.to | 2 Sep 2024
    Let's create a small prototype in Rust to demonstrate the concept using Tera and Axum.
  • Bundle frontend into axum binary using include_dir
    1 project | dev.to | 14 Apr 2024
    There are some proposals on how to do it already such as https://github.com/tokio-rs/axum/issues/1698.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing actix-web and axum you can also consider the following projects:

Rocket - A web framework for Rust.

ntex - framework for composable networking services

salvo - A powerful web framework built with a simplified design.

Tide - Fast and friendly HTTP server framework for async Rust

poem - A full-featured and easy-to-use web framework with the Rust programming language.

Rouille, Rust web server middleware - Web framework in Rust

Warp - Warp is a modern, Rust-based terminal with AI built in so you and your team can build great software, faster.

Gotham - A flexible web framework that promotes stability, safety, security and speed.

rust-web-benchmarks - Benchmarking web frameworks written in rust with rewrk tool.

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Bad PDFs = bad UX. Slow load times, broken annotations, clunky UX frustrates users. Nutrient’s PDF SDKs gives seamless document experiences, fast rendering, annotations, real-time collaboration, 100+ features. Used by 10K+ devs, serving ~half a billion users worldwide. Explore the SDK for free.
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