9 Best Node.js Frameworks for Developers: What is the use of Node.js?

JavaScript has come to the leading-age with the emergence of the Node.js framework.

Many developers around the world have switched JavaScript to create more applications, especially for the web.

Since then, massive growth has been noticed in terms of the usage of frameworks that is built categorically for the JavaScript community. This quick growth helped in guiding the progress of fast prototyping and innovating project creation.

What is the use of Node.js?

The main use of Node.js is to build a quick, highly expandable network applications. It is designed based on an event-driven non-blocking input/output model and its main focus is to make it efficient and lightweight that will be perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run on distributed devices.

Benefits of Node.js web frameworks in short

Node.js frameworks are used mostly due to its impressive productivity, scalability and most importantly it’s speed. Node.js has become the first choice for many experienced developers for building applications for companies.

Using Node.js can help you to write the same language for both front-end and backend which reduces the effort of learning a new language for a few easy implementations. It will also guide you to maintain the same coding pattern all through the program.

A web application framework is basically a combination of helpers, libraries, and tools. These are used to make sure that it help to effortlessly create and run web applications.

The most important aspects of Web framework happens to be its architecture. On top of that it has all the rich features such as expandability, flexibility, security, support for customization, and compatibility with other libraries.

Here, we will talk about the top 9 Node.js frameworks and discuss its features to better help developers understand what to go with.

9 Best Node.js Frameworks for Developers

Over the years many proficient JavaScript developers have built and come up with many impressive frameworks when developing web applications. But we will come up with the 9 best frameworks and how it works. You will be the one to pick the right one for you.

Express.js

Express.js is one of the most fundamental web frameworks for Node.js. It is a fast, recognized and flexible model-view-controller(MVC) node.js framework. It comprises of powerful features developing web and mobile applications. Express.js arrives with a view support system with 14 + template engines and content agreement.

It is a network of routing libraries that offers a thin layer of elemental web application features. It has always prioritized a tremendous performance and along with that it also supports robust routing and HTTP helpers. Express.js has inbuilt useful HTTP utility methods, functions, and middleware that can allow developers to quickly write powerful APIs.

With it’s easy to use functions, it has probably become the most popular Node.js framework for the JavaScript community on Github with above 41,000 stars.

Meteor.js

It is also one of the most used and popular node.js frameworks for building modern web and mobile applications. The Node.js framework is used for easy developing for a complete category of the application that have the same language, JavaScript. The most advantageous feature it packs is its real-time update.

Meteor.js with its great potential is responsible for rendering robust projects like eCommerce open source projects. This framework supports Windows OS, Linux, and OS X. Having heavy potential, it has reached 40,490 stars in Github and that is massive.

Socket.js

Socket.js is a very fast and reliable full-stack framework for building real-time bi-directional applications. It comes with impressive auto-reconnection support, multiplexing and also helps in identifying disconnection. Its key feature includes asynchronous input/output processing, instant messaging options, and binary streaming.

Socket.js comes with a convenient API and can be integrated into more or less every browser, device, and platform. It is also focussing on speed factor and enables real-time concurrency for collaboration of documents.

Koa.js

It is now said as the next-generation web framework for Node.js. The team of developers that built Express.js also built Koa.js. Its intention was to build a smaller, but robust and suggestive establishment for developing web applications and APIs.

It was first introduced to us in 2013 with its futuristic framework. The most solid feature that it packs is allowing you to work without callbacks and on top of that, it gives you an effective method for error handling. Koa.js has a GitHub rating of more than 23,500 currently which makes it one of the most used node.js.

Sails.js

It is used ot create custom-enterprise grade Node.js applications based on node.js framework. Sails.js is one of the most popular MVC node.js that extends supports for every modern apps requirement. The Sails.js has gained speed with having developed chat applications, multi-player games, and dashboards.

It is well-known for its data-driven application program-interface(API) with support to easy WebSocket integration. It is made compatible with most of the front-end such as Android, Windows, iOS e.t.c. Sails.js does not additional routing interestingly. It has acquired more than 19,800 stars in GitHub.

Hapi.js

This node.js framework generally helps to serve data by negotiating between both the client and server-side. Many say it can work as a substitute for the express.js with its configuration-driven pattern that is conventionally built to control web server applications.

Few brilliant key features :

Intensely controls the request handling
Comes with many useful functions for creating web servers
Decent support for document generation
It offers the availability of caching and Authentication.
Built with plug-in based architecture for better expansion.

According to Github, it has a rating of 10.371 which is decent.

Nest.js

Nest.js is based on a framework of Node.js that is extremely useful for creating powerful and expandable Node.js server-side applications. Note.js happens to use up-to-date JavaScript and has been previously built with TypeScript. It works wonders by incorporating Functional Programming (FP), Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and Functional Reactive Programming (FRP).

It is an out of the box application architecture with a lot of rich and crucial features for building highly scalable and easily maintainable applications. Many developers now prefer using Nest.js with having Github star rating of more than 10,000.

LoopBack.js

Another Node.js based framework with a dynamic API explorer. It is an easy-to-use CLI that helps to create models based on dynamic models in the absence of schema.

Its highly-scalable framework are used to build end-to-end REST APIs. Most interesting part it you can do it with more or less no coding.

The way it is designed will support authentication and authorization setup. It helps in adding components for file management and 3rd party log-in. LoopBack.js. It has earned around 12,000 GitHub stars.

Adonis.js

It is definitely based on node.js MVC framework which is compatible with the leading and major operating system. Adonis.js is also a popular MVC web framework that continuously works behind making a stable ecosystem. It is a modern device with multiple service provider support.

A Persistent API enables building full-stack web applications and has support for an ORM backed by SQL databases in mind.

Coming to a conclusion:

We have discussed what could be the best node.js frameworks for developers and we here have a list of the top 9 node.js based framework to help you with your job. Choosing the best one totally depends on your programming skills and experiences over the years.

I hope you all have liked the way it is being organized and have gone through all the points.