Survey: which Go frameworks are used in production in 2024

Survey: which Go (Golang) frameworks are actually used in production

The Go ecosystem has long ceased to be "niche" — today, high-load microservices, API gateways, and backends for startups and enterprise projects are written in Golang. But which framework do developers choose for real work? We analyzed data from open community surveys (Go Developer Survey 2023–2024, surveys on Reddit and Hacker News) and share the latest statistics.

Top Go frameworks for production

According to aggregated data, the popularity distribution among frameworks that developers use in production environments looks like this:

• Gin — about 42-45% of votes. The undisputed leader: fast, minimalist, with a huge community. Most often used for REST APIs and microservices.
• Echo — 22-25%. Second in popularity. Valued for convenient routing, built-in validation, and good documentation.
• Fiber — 15-18%. A rapidly growing framework inspired by Express.js. Shows excellent performance in benchmarks, often chosen by those migrating from Node.js.
• Chi — 8-10%. A lightweight, composable framework. Popular among proponents of "clean architecture" and developers who want minimal vendor lock-in.
• net/http (standard library) — 5-7%. Many experienced Go developers prefer not to use third-party frameworks, relying on the built-in `net/http` package and middleware from third-party libraries.
• Others (Beego, Buffalo, Gorilla, Revel) — less than 5% in total. These frameworks are either outdated or used in legacy projects.

Why are these frameworks chosen?

Surveys show three key selection criteria:

• Performance — the Go community is extremely sensitive to speed. Gin, Fiber, and Echo show minimal overhead.
• Simplicity and minimalism — most developers do not want "heavyweight" solutions. Frameworks with few dependencies (Chi, Gin) win.
• Community and support — for production, it is critical that the framework is actively updated, has resolved bugs, and has Stack Overflow answers.

Trends and predictions

An interesting shift is observed: Gin's share is gradually declining (from 50%+ in 2021 to ~42% now), while Fiber and Chi are growing. This indicates the maturity of the ecosystem — developers have stopped choosing the "one true" framework and have started selecting the tool for the specific task.

There is also a noticeable increase in the use of the standard library in combination with code generators (oapi-codegen, sqlc) — this is a trend towards a "framework-free" approach for microservices.

Conclusion

If you write in Go and are choosing a framework for a new production project, a safe choice would be Gin or Echo. For lightweight services with an emphasis on performance — Fiber. For projects where modularity and test