Hono Handles Four Times More Requests Than Express on Node.js 26
For over a decade, Express.js has been the undisputed king of the Node.js ecosystem. Its robust middleware system and "unopinionated" philosophy helped build the modern web. However, as the industry shifts toward serverless architectures and edge computing, the weight of legacy code is starting to show. Recent benchmarks have sent shockwaves through the developer community, revealing that Hono handles four times more requests than Express on Node.js 26, marking a definitive turning point in the evolution of JavaScript backends.
The release of Node.js 26 introduced significant optimizations to the V8 engine and internal stream handling, but not every framework is equipped to leverage these hardware-level improvements. While Express remains bogged down by synchronous overhead and a complex routing tree, Hono—a lightweight, "Ultrafast" web framework—has emerged as the clear performance leader. For developers struggling with high latency and ballooning infrastructure costs, this performance gap is no longer just a technical curiosity; it is a business imperative.
The Architectural Shift: Why Node.js 26 Favors Hono
The performance disparity between these two frameworks isn't accidental. It is the result of two fundamentally different architectural philosophies meeting the high-performance environment of Node.js 26. Express was designed in an era where servers were persistent and memory was the primary constraint. In contrast, Hono was built for the Edge, where cold starts and execution speed are the only metrics that matter.
The Problem with Legacy Middleware
Express relies on a recursive middleware execution pattern that was revolutionary in 2010 but struggles with the asynchronous demands of modern applications. Every request in Express must traverse a deep stack of functions, many of which involve legacy error handling that prevents the V8 engine from performing Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation optimizations effectively.
