Hono.js Is What Express Should Have Been — Build APIs in 5 Minutes

Express Is 14 Years Old. We Can Do Better. Express was revolutionary in 2010. But in 2026, it still has no built-in TypeScript support, no native async/await, and middleware ordering bugs that haunt every team. Hono.js fixes all of this in a 14KB package that runs on every runtime : Node, Bun, Deno, Cloudflare Workers, Vercel, AWS Lambda. Hello World import { Hono } from " hono " ; const app = new Hono (); app . get ( " / " , ( c ) => c . text ( " Hello World " )); app . get ( " /json " , ( c ) => c . json ({ message : " Hello " })); app . get ( " /user/:id " , ( c ) => { const id = c . req . param ( " id " ); return c . json ({ id , name : " John " }); }); export default app ; That's it. No require , no app.listen() , no callback hell. Why It's Better Than Express Feature Express Hono TypeScript Manual setup Built-in Bundle size 200KB+ 14KB Async handlers Needs wrapper Native Validation Install zod + middleware Built-in validator OpenAPI docs Install swagger Built-in Runtime support N