Axum

Axum is a Rust web framework maintained by the Tokio team, which makes it the most tightly integrated choice in Rust's async ecosystem. It is built on Hyper for HTTP and Tower for middleware, keeping their performance while adding an ergonomic layer for routing and handlers.

The design is macro-free: routes are plain async functions, and request data (path parameters, query strings, JSON bodies, headers, cookies, shared state) is pulled out through typed extractors rather than attribute macros. That keeps compile errors readable, compile times reasonable, and handlers easy to unit-test without starting a server.

Middleware runs entirely on Tower's Service and Layer abstractions, so middleware written for Axum also works with Hyper and Tonic (gRPC) services. The tower-http crate provides ready-made layers for CORS, tracing, compression, request IDs, timeouts, and authentication. The framework itself forbids unsafe code, and recent versions use native async functions in traits, so no #[async_trait] macro is needed.

Axum is free under the MIT licence and has become the usual starting point for new Rust HTTP services. It is still pre-1.0, so minor releases (0.6, 0.7, 0.8) have brought breaking changes, and it is deliberately small: databases, templating, sessions, and auth come from separate crates such as SQLx, Askama, and tower-sessions. Actix Web edges it in some raw-throughput benchmarks, while Axum usually wins on ergonomics and ecosystem fit.