Apps Built with Express

Express is the minimal option in the Node ecosystem and stays popular for exactly that reason. It gives you routing and middleware and then gets out of the way, which suits teams who want to decide their own structure or who are building something small enough that a full framework would be overhead. In practice that covers a lot of ground: internal APIs, webhook receivers for payment and SMS providers, thin backends behind a mobile app, and prototypes that quietly became production. The trade-off is real: Express decides almost nothing for you, so project structure, validation and error handling are yours to get right, and codebases drift without discipline. Its longevity is also an asset: almost every integration guide and Stack Overflow answer in the Node world assumes it, which shortens debugging for self-taught developers. See the products built on it below.