New Rust Framework Gains Popularity: What You Need to Know

New framework for Rust gains popularity: overview of features and prospects

The Rust language ecosystem continues to develop rapidly. In 2025, the developer community was attracted by a new web framework that promises to change the perception of backend development in this language. We are talking about Axum — a framework created by the Tokio team that is gaining momentum thanks to its modularity, performance, and tight integration with the Rust async ecosystem.

Why Axum?

Unlike monolithic solutions like Rocket or Actix, Axum offers a fundamentally different approach. It is built on top of proven crates Tokio, Tower, and Hyper, which makes it not just another framework, but rather a set of building blocks. This allows developers to flexibly configure an application without unnecessary dependencies.

Key features that have driven Axum's growth in popularity:

• Modularity. You only include what is actually needed for the project: routing, middleware, request handling.
• High performance. Axum shows results comparable to Hyper and Actix, sometimes surpassing them in tests with a large number of concurrent connections.
• Simple integration. The framework is fully compatible with Tower (the standard interface for middleware in Rust), allowing you to use ready-made components for logging, compression, and request rate limiting.
• Async out of the box. All work is built on tokio, ensuring maximum efficiency when handling many simultaneous requests.

Comparison with Actix and Rocket

If Actix has long been the standard for high-load systems, and Rocket attracted with its syntax simplicity, then Axum occupies the sweet spot. Here is a brief comparison:

• Actix: higher speed, but more complex architecture and more type magic.
• Rocket: convenience for beginners, but dependence on stable Rust versions and less flexibility in configuring middleware.
• Axum: balance between performance and code readability, plus full control over the application lifecycle.

Example of a simple application on Axum

To appreciate the conciseness of the framework, take a look at a basic server example with one endpoint:

use axum::{Router, routing::get, response::Html};

async fn hello_handler() -> Html<&'static str> {    Html("<h1>Hello, world!</h1>")}

#[tokio::main]async fn main() {    let app = Router::new()        .route("/", get(hello_handler));

    axum::Server::bind(&"0.0.0.0:3000".parse().unwrap())        .serve(app.into_make_service())        .await        .unwrap();}

As you can see, the syntax is intuitively understandable even for those just starting to learn Rust. Routes are defined through handler methods, and all asynchrony is hidden behind the #[tokio::main] macro.

Prospects and conclusions

According to the JetBrains survey for 2025, Axum entered the top three most used web frameworks for Rust, surpassing Rocket and approaching Actix. This is no coincidence: the framework is actively supported, has detailed documentation, and an excellent community.

If you are looking for a tool to create fast, reliable