Fastify

Fastify is a high-performance Node.js web framework built around two central ideas: JSON schema validation and a plugin architecture. Every route can declare a JSON Schema for its request body, query parameters, and response — Fastify compiles these schemas into validation functions and uses fast-json-stringify for serialisation, typically making it 2× faster than Express in comparable benchmarks.

The plugin system uses fastify-plugin to encapsulate and compose functionality. Each plugin has its own scope for decorators, hooks, and route prefixes, preventing collisions between independent features. This makes it straightforward to build modular applications where authentication, database connection, error handling, and business routes are each isolated plugins registered at startup.

Logging is built on Pino — a structured JSON logger significantly more performant than console.log or Winston. TypeScript support is first-class: all core APIs are typed and the schema validation integrates with TypeBox or JSON Schema to provide end-to-end type safety from HTTP request to handler function. The ecosystem includes 40+ official plugins for Swagger, JWT, CORS, WebSockets, and database clients.