Let’s talk real — Express had its moment. But the dev world? It's moving fast.
I recently jumped into building APIs using Hono (tiny, fast, edge-native framework) with Bun (next-gen JS runtime), and honestly... the experience is smooth, fast, type-safe, and just way more modern.
If you're still bootstrapping new APIs with Node + Express in 2025, here's why you might wanna reconsider 👇
💨 1. Performance: Express feels like 3G, Hono + Bun is basically 5G with fiber.
Express is stable, sure. But it’s built on top of Node.js — which is showing its age.
Hono, paired with Bun, delivers edge-native performance with crazy-fast cold starts and minimal overhead.
Here's an example of a basic route in both:
Express:
import express from "express";
const app = express();
app.get("/hello", (req, res) => {
res.send("Hello from Express!");
});
app.listen(3000, () => console.log("Running on 3000"));
Hono (with Bun):
import { Hono } from "hono";
const app = new Hono();
app.get("/hello", (c) => c.text("Hello from Hono!"));
export default app;
Hono is simpler, lighter, and doesn’t even need an external server setup when deployed on Bun or Cloudflare Workers.
🧠 2. TypeScript-first, no hacks.
Hono gives you full type safety — route params, request bodies, responses, all typed out of the box.
Example: typed route with request body validation
import { Hono } from "hono";
import { z } from "zod";
import { zValidator } from "@hono/zod-validator";
const app = new Hono();
const schema = z.object({
name: z.string(),
});
app.post(
"/greet",
zValidator("json", schema),
(c) => {
const { name } = c.req.valid("json");
return c.json({ message: `Hello, ${name}` });
}
);
Express doesn’t do this out of the box. You’ll need to install types, use custom middlewares, and fight with TS at every step.
📦 3. Everything you need, built-in.
No more:
npm i body-parser cors express-validator helmet morgan ...
Hono comes with:
- Native async/await
- Middleware support (with simple chaining)
- Typed routing
- Built-in utilities for validation, cookies, headers, etc.
- Compatible with the Fetch API standard (super easy to work with)
It just… works.
🧪 4. Bun is more than a runtime — it’s a dev toolkit on steroids.
When you install Bun, you get:
✅ bun test — runs blazing fast (bye Jest)
✅ bun install — faster than npm/yarn/pnpm
✅ bun bun — built-in bundler
✅ bun transpile — TS/JS support without config hell
bun init
bun install hono
bun run src/index.ts
That’s your API up and running — no config, no fuss.
🌍 5. Edge-native by design.
Apps are going serverless and edge-first — Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy, etc.
Hono was literally built for these environments.
Express? Still assumes a traditional Node server on a VM somewhere.
⚡ TL;DR
Express is that old reliable — but Hono + Bun is the modern way forward:
Fast, type-safe, minimal, edge-ready, and DX-focused.
If you're starting a new API project in 2025, this combo is lowkey the move.
🔥 Bonus: Open-source starter repo?
If this gets enough interest, I’ll publish a public boilerplate repo using Hono + Bun + TypeScript. Let me know in the comments or drop a 🧠 if you’d want that!
Thanks for reading!
Let’s build APIs the modern way 🚀
#javascript #bun #hono #typescript #nodejs #api #webdev #backend #edgecomputing #fullstack