Cross-posted from my blog. The original, with any updates, lives on fabwaseem.com .

"NestJS vs Hono vs Fastify" is one of the most common backend questions I see from TypeScript developers in 2026, and most answers are either opinion or benchmarks from 2023. So I ran my own: the same three routes on Express 5.3, Fastify 5.12, Hono 4.13, NestJS 12.3 on Express and NestJS 12.3 on Fastify , all on Node.js 26.13 (the current LTS), on the same machine, with the same load generator.

This post gives you the numbers, the exact code, and a straight answer on which one to pick for an API, a SaaS backend or an edge function.

The test setup

Machine: one 8-vCPU Intel Xeon Linux VM. The server was pinned to one CPU core with taskset -c 0 (Node runs your JavaScript on one thread, so this is a fair per-process number).…