Recently I have seen a lot of developers in social media, LinkedIn precisely, considering Express.js as a backend framework, which is completely not the case. In this short article, I will just clarify some important points on how we can consider any framework to be a backend focuses or not.

In the official Express.js GitHub repo, they mentioned clearly:

The Express philosophy is to provide small, robust tooling for HTTP servers, making it a great solution for single page applications, websites, hybrids, or public HTTP APIs.

That's supposed to clear a lot of points now, Express.js is just an HTTP server built on the default HTTP library of Node.js, it added some extra features to it but not a full backend framework.

If you have used PHP for example, you'll find a lot of backend focused frameworks such as Symfony, CakePHP, Laravel, and a lot of others. In Python, we have Django, Flask, in Ruby, there are Ruby on Rails, Sinatra… All of these are a real backend frameworks that gives you an included set of tools that will make your development easier and faster.

In the world of JavaScript, we have some amazing backend focused frameworks such as NestJS, AdonisJS, these two are the leaders in the field.

Happy coding.