Node.js Community Chooses Best Libraries of 2024

JavaScript (Node.js) Community Chooses Best Libraries of the Year: 2024 Voting Results

The annual voting among Node.js developers has concluded — the community has chosen the best libraries and tools of 2024. This year, a record number of participants (over 25,000 developers) evaluated hundreds of packages from the npm ecosystem. We've compiled the key categories and winners that everyone working with server-side JavaScript should know.

🥇 Best Web Framework: Express.js (still leading)

Despite the rise of competitors (Fastify, Hono, and Bun), the classic Express.js retained its title as the most popular framework. However, second place went to Fastify — its speed and built-in schema validation attracted 34% of the votes. Third place was shared by NestJS and Hono (for edge environments).

🥇 Best ORM/Database Library: Prisma

Prisma confidently surpassed Sequelize and Knex. Developers noted its convenient type generator, migrations, and support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and MongoDB. Among this year's newcomers — Drizzle ORM, which received 18% of the votes for its lightweight nature and TypeScript compatibility.

🥇 Best Testing Tool: Vitest

In the testing category, a sensation: Vitest (Vite ecosystem) overtook the classic Jest. Reasons — speed, built-in ESM support, and compatibility with Jest syntax. Third place goes to Playwright (integration and e2e testing).

🥇 Best API Development Tool: tRPC

The tRPC library was recognized as the best way to create APIs without REST or GraphQL. It allows calling server functions directly from the client with full typing. Second place — Hono RPC, third — GraphQL Yoga.

🥇 Best DevOps/Build Tool: Biome

In the category of linting and code formatting tools, Biome won — a fast replacement for ESLint + Prettier, written in Rust. Second place went to Oxlint, third — the classic ESLint (with Flat Config plugins).

🥇 Best Library for Async Work: P-limit

The small but powerful P-limit library for limiting concurrent requests received 41% of the votes. Second place — Async (waterfall, series), third — Promise.allSettled (built-in method).

📊 General Voting Trends

• TypeScript — 98% of winners use or support strict typing.
• Speed — developers are increasingly choosing tools built on Rust and Go (Biome, Oxlint, Bun).
• Edge compatibility — growing popularity of libraries that work in Cloudflare Workers and Deno.

The full list of winners and nominees is published on the official survey website. If you're just starting to learn Node.js, we recommend beginning with Express.js or Fastify, adding Prisma for database work, and Vitest for testing — this is the minimum set approved by thousands of developers.

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