Hono

Hono is designed for the modern edge runtime landscape — the same code runs on Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy, Bun, and Node.js. Its trie-based router is among the fastest available, and full TypeScript support with RPC-style client generation makes end-to-end type safety straightforward. Its minimal footprint and zero dependencies make it particularly suited for Cloudflare Workers where cold starts are sensitive to bundle size.

Quick start

npm create hono@latest my-app
# Select: Cloudflare Workers (or Node.js / Bun)
cd my-app && npm install && npm run dev

// src/index.ts
import { Hono } from 'hono'
import { cors } from 'hono/cors'
import { logger } from 'hono/logger'

type Post = { id: number; title: string; body: string }

const app = new Hono()
const posts: Post[] = []

app.use('*', logger())
app.use('/api/*', cors())

app.get('/api/posts', (c) => c.json(posts))

app.post('/api/posts', async (c) => {
  const body = await c.req.json<Omit<Post, 'id'>>()
  const post = { id: posts.length + 1, ...body }
  posts.push(post)
  return c.json(post, 201)
})

app.get('/api/posts/:id', (c) => {
  const id = Number(c.req.param('id'))
  const post = posts.find(p => p.id === id)
  return post ? c.json(post) : c.json({ error: 'Not found' }, 404)
})

export default app

When to use

Hono is the best choice for APIs deployed to edge runtimes (Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy) where bundle size and cold-start time are critical. Its universal runtime support means one codebase targets all JS environments. For Node.js-only projects, Express or Fastify have larger ecosystems. Hono’s RPC layer is particularly compelling when you want Next.js-like end-to-end type safety without a full framework.