Express VS Nest

Compare Express vs Nest and see what are their differences.

Express

Fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for node. (by expressjs)

Nest

A progressive Node.js framework for building efficient, scalable, and enterprise-grade server-side applications with TypeScript/JavaScript 🚀 (by nestjs)
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Express Nest
638 302
62,444 61,347
0.4% 1.3%
6.6 9.8
3 days ago 4 days ago
JavaScript TypeScript
MIT License 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.

Express

Posts with mentions or reviews of Express. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-07.

Nest

Posts with mentions or reviews of Nest. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-11-20.
  • Best NodeJS frameworks for seamless backend development
    13 projects | dev.to | 20 Nov 2023
    Community stats: NestJS has a large community with 60.5k stars and 7.2k forks on GitHub. 12,033 are tagged 'nestjs' on StackOverflow and an active discord community of 43,436 is also there to support fellow developers.
    13 projects | dev.to | 20 Nov 2023
    NestJS is a progressive framework for NodeJS for building server-side applications with JavaScript and TypeScript. NestJS follows a modular architecture enabling developers to create complex applications by organizing components into separate, independent modules, ensuring maintainability and reusability across various parts of the application.
  • Server-Side Rendering (SSR) in React
    3 projects | dev.to | 18 Nov 2023
    Documentation
  • Como deixar o Swagger com tema dark mode usando Swaggo e Golang
    5 projects | dev.to | 11 Nov 2023
  • Supercharge Your Testing Workflow: Creating Unit and E2E Tests 10x Faster with ChatGPT-3 Inside NestJS
    2 projects | dev.to | 8 Nov 2023
    For both, during my circle of development, I didn’t use TDD or other methods, I just wrote the services, classes, and modules and then I went to the tests, at this time I already had the base structure, so I opened Phind or ChatGPT-3 and I asked them to create a test to cover as much cases as possible using NestJS and its way of implementing tests, and in just a few seconds I have lots of tests ready! For a few of them I had to fix some small details, but overall, it was very good!
  • TypeORM - remove children with orphanedRowAction
    3 projects | dev.to | 6 Nov 2023
    TypeORM is a very convenient ORM for JS apps. We use it with NestJS and running it on NodeJS.
  • Creating a NodeJS project without frameworks in 2023
    5 projects | dev.to | 31 Oct 2023
    We applied lots of things, techniques, and patterns, but in the end, I felt good with the application that was built. Now I also can say that I am feeling a bit up-to-date with the technologies that this project involved and the way of building software without a framework, it also reminds me, why I like so much of using Frameworks…. go NestJS 💪🏼
  • ECMAScript Decorators. The Ones That are Real
    6 projects | dev.to | 24 Oct 2023
    2023-05 – Angular v16 is here. Angular 16 also added support for ECMAScript decorators. However, some other frameworks built around decorators (and which were inspired by Angular?) have stated that they will not make changes toward ECMAScript decorators for now. For many of them, two important aspects are Metadata and Parameter decorators.
  • How Many Dependencies Does Your Project Really Have?
    3 projects | dev.to | 15 Oct 2023
    My NestJS project have 719 dependencies, after i saw the audit of next.js, nest.js didn't suprice me at all.
  • Hacktoberfest 2023 with Ghostfolio
    9 projects | dev.to | 26 Sep 2023
    Ghostfolio is written in TypeScript and organized as an Nx workspace, utilizing the latest framework releases. The backend is based on NestJS in combination with PostgreSQL as a database together with Prisma and Redis for caching. The frontend is built with Angular.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Express and Nest you can also consider the following projects:

Next.js - The React Framework

SailsJS - Realtime MVC Framework for Node.js

Koa - Expressive middleware for node.js using ES2017 async functions

loopback-next - LoopBack makes it easy to build modern API applications that require complex integrations.

feathers - The API and real-time application framework

Ts.ED - :triangular_ruler: Ts.ED is a Node.js and TypeScript framework on top of Express to write your application with TypeScript (or ES6). It provides a lot of decorators and guideline to make your code more readable and less error-prone. ⭐️ Star to support our work!

SvelteKit - web development, streamlined

Django - The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines.

Moleculer - :rocket: Progressive microservices framework for Node.js

Hapi - The Simple, Secure Framework Developers Trust

tsoa - Build OpenAPI-compliant REST APIs using TypeScript and Node

Nuxt.js - Nuxt is an intuitive and extendable way to create type-safe, performant and production-grade full-stack web apps and websites with Vue 3. [Moved to: https://github.com/nuxt/nuxt]