Comparing Fastify vs Express Performance in Production

Introduction

Choose the right framework: comparing Fastify and Express under production load to help you pick the optimal performance stack.

Prerequisites

• Node.js >=16
• autocannon benchmarking tool

Step 1: Setup Example Servers

Create two projects: express-server and fastify-server, each exposing a /ping endpoint:

const express = require("express");
const app = express();
app.get("/ping", (req, res) => res.send("pong"));
app.listen(3001);

import Fastify from "fastify";
const app = Fastify();
app.get("/ping", async () => "pong");
app.listen({ port: 3002 });

Step 2: Install Autocannon

npm install -g autocannon

Step 3: Run Benchmarks

# Express
autocannon -c 100 -d 30 -p 10 http://localhost:3001/ping

# Fastify
autocannon -c 100 -d 30 -p 10 http://localhost:3002/ping

Results

Analysis

• Fastify shows ~4x higher throughput and 5x lower latency.
• JSON schema-based optimizations in Fastify reduce overhead.

Summary

For production workloads, Fastify outperforms Express in throughput and latency, making it ideal for high-performance APIs.