Hono

Hono is a small TypeScript web framework for writing HTTP APIs and simple server-rendered pages. It solves a specific problem: code written for one JavaScript runtime usually breaks on another, while Hono's same app runs on Cloudflare Workers, Deno, Bun, Node.js, AWS Lambda, Vercel, Netlify, Fastly and others.

How it works: Hono is built only on Web Standard APIs. A handler receives a context object wrapping a standard Request and returns a standard Response, and an app is just an object with a fetch method, which is the shape edge runtimes expect. On Node.js it runs through an adapter (Node 18.14+). Routes and middleware chain the way Express users expect, and the core has zero dependencies.

What you get: built-in middleware for CORS, CSRF, JWT and bearer auth, secure headers, compression, caching and request IDs; validators for Zod, Valibot and others; an RPC client that infers request and response types straight from your server routes, so a frontend gets typed API calls without code generation; JSX rendering, streaming and WebSocket helpers; and OpenAPI generation through community middleware. Deployment is wherever your runtime runs; there is no hosted Hono service.

The limit is scope: Hono is a router, not a full framework. It has no ORM, no project structure and no built-in admin or auth system, and its validator is deliberately thin. Its docs also advise against Rails-style controllers, because path types are lost when handlers are split away from route definitions.