tower VS axum

Compare tower vs axum and see what are their differences.

tower

async fn(Request) -> Result<Response, Error> (by tower-rs)

axum

Ergonomic and modular web framework built with Tokio, Tower, and Hyper (by tokio-rs)
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tower axum
14 150
3,258 16,204
2.6% 6.6%
2.1 9.2
13 days ago 4 days ago
Rust Rust
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.

tower

Posts with mentions or reviews of tower. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-10-07.
  • Collection of trait implementations with associated types (GATs?)
    1 project | /r/rust | 15 Feb 2023
    This question is partially inspired by this PR which is kinda trying to do the same thing.
  • dd-trace-layer - A web application middleware for sending Datadog's trace
    3 projects | /r/rust | 7 Oct 2022
    dd-trace-layer is a middleware for sending Datadog's trace. It's based on Tower and OpenTelemetry Rust.
  • GCP firestore and logging SDK in rust
    3 projects | /r/rust | 6 Oct 2022
    I'm pretty sure that GCP's APIs (unlike AWS, which uses Smithy for very genuinely, very good reason) are defined using Protobuf and can be communicated with over gRPC, which means that you don't need to bind via cxx to GCP's C++ APIs. Take a look at this example using Tonic. If you're to use Tonic, you'll also be able to use Tower's middleware (main crate, http-specific) to implement retries, timeouts, tracing, and all the other things you need to be production-ready.
  • Which Rust web framework to choose in 2022 (with code examples)
    7 projects | dev.to | 27 Sep 2022
    #[derive(Clone)] struct MyMiddleware { inner: S, } impl Service> for MyMiddleware where S: Service, Response = Response> + Clone + Send + 'static, S::Future: Send + 'static, { type Response = S::Response; type Error = S::Error; type Future = BoxFuture<'static, Result>; fn poll_ready(&mut self, cx: &mut Context<'_>) -> Poll> { self.inner.poll_ready(cx) } fn call(&mut self, mut req: Request) -> Self::Future { println!("before"); // best practice is to clone the inner service like this // see https://github.com/tower-rs/tower/issues/547 for details let clone = self.inner.clone(); let mut inner = std::mem::replace(&mut self.inner, clone); Box::pin(async move { let res: Response = inner.call(req).await?; println!("after"); Ok(res) }) } } fn main() { let app = Router::new() .route("/", get(|| async { /* ... */ })) .layer(layer_fn(|inner| MyMiddleware { inner })); }
  • How to schedule and run cron jobs in Rust using apalis
    2 projects | dev.to | 14 Aug 2022
    For this tutorial, we're going to use apalis to run cron jobs in an async context. We will also look at how to decorate our jobs with tower middleware allowing us to unlock features like retries, prometheus, sentry etc
  • Warp or Rocket.rs or Actix Web?
    8 projects | /r/rust | 29 May 2022
    So I have now had a look at Axum and think I will give it a try. In the readme in the repository it says something about tower or tower::Service and tonic, what exactly is that? I do not understand that yet.
  • tower-lsp 0.16.0 — Lightweight framework for building LSP servers
    2 projects | /r/rust | 11 Mar 2022
    Better compatibility with tower ecosystem.
  • ratpack: a simpleton's HTTP framework
    6 projects | /r/rust | 24 Jan 2022
    ratpack is idealized in the simplicity of the sinatra (ruby) framework in its goal, and attempts to be an alternative to other async HTTP frameworks such as tower, warp, axum, and tide.
  • When and how to use traits?
    3 projects | /r/rust | 21 Aug 2021
    i would browse the standard library, tower, nom, or my own bitvec to see layout and trait/record separation. in particular, std::io and std::net may be of use: io::Read and io::Write are pervasive examples of implementing unixy file-descriptor-like behavior in the type system
  • I could use some help!
    2 projects | /r/learnrust | 15 Jul 2021
    We're not there yet. I keep an eye on Tower which looks promising to build on top of. And I keep an eye on MoonZoon (full stack framework, unashamedly opinionated!).

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 2024-02-21.
  • 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.
  • Prodzilla: From Zero to Prod with Rust and Shuttle
    6 projects | dev.to | 21 Feb 2024
    Moreover, I especially like where Rust is right now in the web space. It really feels like there’s a lot of smart people working on the next generation of web development tools - it feels like the place to be. There are a range of great open-source web dev tools that are just reaching critical levels of maturity. Axum, which I used to build Prodzilla, feels ready for out of the box web dev, and is crazy-performant, as I write about later. More recently available is Loco, a Rails-like framework for building web applications in Rust that's picking up steam. And in dev-tooling and hosting there’s Shuttle, a 1-line hosting solution for Rust backends.
  • CryptoFlow: Building a secure and scalable system with Axum and SvelteKit - Part 1
    3 projects | dev.to | 5 Jan 2024
    CryptoFlow is a full-stack web application built with Axum and SvelteKit. It's a Q&A system tailored towards the world of cryptocurrency!
  • Cryptoflow: Building a secure and scalable system with Axum and SvelteKit - Part 0
    12 projects | dev.to | 4 Jan 2024
    You also get to specify the accepted HTTP method of the URL via axum::routing. To answer its name, modularity, Axum also supports nested routes as we'll see later in this series. Next is the layer, a method used to apply tower::Layer to all routes before it. This means that routes added after the layer method will not have such a layer applied to their requests. In our case, we used the layer to add tracing to all HTTP requests and responses to our routes. This is needed for proper logging. The tower_http::trace::TraceLayer can even be really customised.
  • My first project with rust
    3 projects | /r/rust | 8 Dec 2023
    I build simple rust axum api server with Prisma client rust. This is my something done with rust and I really enjoyed rust!
  • Getting Started with Axum - Rust's Most Popular Framework
    5 projects | dev.to | 6 Dec 2023
    In this article we'll take a comprehensive look at how to use Axum to write a web service. This will also include the 0.7 changes.
  • How serve static files with rust?
    1 project | /r/rust | 6 Dec 2023
  • Trying out Leptos: Fine-grained Reactive Framework for Rust
    4 projects | dev.to | 18 Oct 2023
    You have a couple of options for the underlying web framework to pair with Leptos: Axum or Actix. Axum seems to carry more favour currently, so we start with that. Assuming you already have Rust set up on your system:
  • Help required: Port kellnr from rocket.rs to axum
    2 projects | /r/rust | 6 Oct 2023
    I’m the author of https://kellnr.io. When I started working on Kellnr three years ago, https://rocket.rs was “the web framework” to use. Unfortunately, the project seems dead. Before adding more functionality using an unmaintained framework, I want to port Kellnr to https://github.com/tokio-rs/axum.
  • Grimoire - A recipe management application.
    7 projects | /r/rust | 5 Oct 2023
    Web Framework : axum.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing tower and axum you can also consider the following projects:

hyper - An HTTP library for Rust

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

tower-lsp - Language Server Protocol implementation written in Rust

Rocket - A web framework for Rust.

tower-http - HTTP specific Tower utilities.

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

bitvec - A crate for managing memory bit by bit

warp - A super-easy, composable, web server framework for warp speeds.

apalis - Simple, extensible multithreaded background job and message processing library for Rust

rust-web-framework-comparison - A comparison of some web frameworks and libs written in Rust

Tide - Fast and friendly HTTP server framework for async Rust

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