Survey: Which Rust Frameworks Are Actually Used in Production in 2025

Survey: Which Rust Frameworks Are Used in Production

The Rust ecosystem continues to develop actively, and in 2025 the language has moved beyond systems programming, increasingly being used for building web services, microservices, and high-load APIs. But which frameworks do developers choose for real-world projects running under load? A fresh survey among members of the Rust community, conducted by the portal Rust Survey 2025, provided the answer to this question.

Survey Methodology

More than 3,500 developers from 50 countries took part in the survey. Participants were asked to indicate which frameworks they use in production (multiple answers were allowed). Respondents represented both startups and large companies (including FAANG).

Rating Leaders

• Actix Web — 42% of respondents. Despite its turbulent history with a fork, Actix remains the most popular framework for high-performance HTTP servers. It is used in real-time systems, streaming, and APIs with millions of requests per day.
• Axum — 38%. The framework from the Tokio team is rapidly gaining momentum. Thanks to deep integration with tokio/tower and excellent documentation, Axum has become the #1 choice for new projects.
• Rocket — 22%. Popular in startups and prototypes due to its ergonomic syntax and minimal boilerplate. However, its share decreases in larger projects.
• Warp — 15%. A lightweight filter-based framework, often used for microservices and proxy servers.
• Salvo — 6%. A new player that attracted attention with async middleware and built-in WebSocket support.

What Else the Survey Showed

In addition to the main frameworks, participants mentioned popular auxiliary libraries:

• Tokio — the async runtime is used in 87% of production projects. It is the absolute standard.
• Serde — data serialization/deserialization is used in 74% of projects.
• SQLx — an async database driver, mentioned by 31% of participants.
• Diesel — an ORM popular in monolithic applications (18%).

Trends and Conclusions

The survey showed that the Rust community is gradually moving away from "experimental" usage in favor of stable and mature solutions. Actix Web and Axum occupy nearly 80% of the web framework market. At the same time, a clear trend is observed: new projects are increasingly choosing Axum due to its compatibility with the modern Tokio stack and ease of testing.

For those just starting to learn Rust for web development, experts recommend looking towards Axum or Actix Web. Rocket remains an excellent choice for rapid prototyping, but in production it falls short in performance and flexibility.

The full survey results are available on the official Rust Survey website. And here at PythonLib, we will continue to follow the development of the Rust ecosystem and share the most up-to-date data.