[Chyzwar]

Express.js active development seems to stop. The last commit on v5 branch was from October 2018. We are still waiting for http2 (2 years) or better support for promises (3 years).

  https://github.com/expressjs/express/tree/5.0
  https://github.com/expressjs/express/pull/4196
  https://github.com/expressjs/express/issues/2761

If someone is doing a new project in node I would recommend:

  https://github.com/fastify/fastify
  https://github.com/hapijs/hapi

In the above benchmark, fastify would probably narrow the gap.

  https://www.fastify.io/benchmarks/

[srgpqt]

I feel like Koa JS deserves a mention.

https://koajs.com/

[hombre_fatal]

Koa is great and makes the two obvious improvements to Express: first-class promises, and bubbling up a representation of the response instead of having your routes directly send the response. So you now have middleware instead of just Express' "beforeware".

[SahAssar]

If it is a small project I'd recommend just using the built in http server. It is what all these projects use anyway, and if it's just a few routes it's usually easier to just use that instead of pulling in more dependencies.

[freeopinion]

Better support for promises? Koa 2 since 4 years ago.