Companies Using Express.js

We detect Express.js on 138,238 domains, including Ford, TD Bank, Domino's Pizza. A detection means the technology is present on that domain, which for large organisations is often a single storefront or subdomain rather than a company-wide deployment. Among domains we matched to a company with a resolved industry, the most common is Software Development (6.47%).

We detect 138,238 domains running Express.js across our monthly crawl of live business domains. Company data could be matched for 71,100 of them (51.4%), and every company-size, industry and country breakdown on this page describes that matched subset rather than the full detected base. A further 18,156 domains carried a Express.js detection previously and no longer do.

Express.js holds 7.46% of the Web Frameworks category, ranking #4. This is a share of the domains we detect running a platform in this category — not a share of all websites, and not a share of spending — so it is not directly comparable to figures published on other denominators.

The top alternatives to Express.js include Microsoft ASP.NET (46.19% market share), Ruby on Rails (10.96% market share), Nuxt.js (10.25% market share), Laravel (4.87% market share) — measured as a share of the domains we detect running a platform in this category.

United States leads with 22,619 matched Express.js domains, followed by India (4,716), United Kingdom (4,544), Brazil (3,946), Germany (2,801). These are counts within the 71,100 domains we could match to a company record, not the full detected base.

The most common company size is 1-10 employees, representing 65.09% of the Express.js domains we could match to a company record and size — a subset of 71,100 matched companies, not of all 138,238 detected domains. This is followed by 11-50 employees (21.45%) and 51-200 employees (7.72%).

Among the Express.js domains we could match to a company with a known founding date, most were founded in the 2010s (40.54%), followed by the 2020s (33.75%). That matched subset is drawn from 71,100 companies and is not representative of all 138,238 detected domains. This suggests Express.js is most popular among relatively young companies.

The ideal Express.js customer is: Company Age: Founded 2010-2019, Company Maturity: ~7-16 years old, Tech Stack: Cloudflare, Tailwind CSS, React, Primary Use: APIs, portals and marketplaces, Developer Focus: JavaScript developers — based on our analysis of 71,100 enriched companies at TechnologyChecker.io.

Express sets X-Powered-By: Express on every response by default. It does nothing functional; it simply names the framework. Most security guidance recommends removing it, since it hands anyone probing the site a free hint about the stack. One line does it: app.disable('x-powered-by'). Helmet, the standard Express security middleware, removes it automatically as soon as you add it. Removing the header changes nothing about how the application behaves.

No. That figure is a floor. Express.js is detected by a single signal, the default X-Powered-By: Express response header, and disabling that header is routine practice. Any deployment running Helmet or calling app.disable('x-powered-by') is invisible to a header-based check while still running Express.js. The real installed base is larger, and the gap is widest among security-conscious teams. Read 138,238 as the number of Express.js deployments that still advertise themselves.

Our August 2026 crawl puts Express.js at 138,238 domains. Counts move month to month because the set of domains crawled turns over, so a change on its own is not evidence that sites added or removed the framework. The detection rule has not changed: one response header, present or absent. The separate churn figure of 18,156 counts domains that stopped returning the header since we began tracking in March 2026, and that includes teams who simply switched the header off as well as genuine migrations.

Often, yes. NestJS uses Express as its default HTTP adapter, so a stock NestJS application returns the same X-Powered-By: Express header unless the team disables it or swaps in the Fastify adapter. The header identifies the underlying HTTP layer, not the framework a developer thinks they are working in. This cuts both ways for the count: it includes some Nest applications and excludes Express applications that hid the header.

ASP.NET is Microsoft's server-side framework for .NET languages, with strong typing and a large enterprise tooling estate behind it. Express.js is a minimal HTTP layer for Node.js that leaves architecture to you. In our Web Frameworks category ASP.NET leads at 46.19% (856,440 domains) against Express.js at 7.46% (138,238), but the two are found by very different signals: ASP.NET can be matched on .asp and .aspx URLs as well as on headers and cookies, a much wider net than the single header that identifies Express.js. The gap is real, just smaller than the ranking implies.

Yes, and the detected base understates it. 138,238 domains still return the default Express header, including Ford, Cisco, Salesforce, TD Bank and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, almost always on API, store and portal subdomains. What has changed is that Express.js is no longer the automatic choice for a new Node.js project. Fastify, NestJS and Hono compete for greenfield work, and full-stack frameworks such as Next.js and Nuxt.js absorb cases that would once have started life as an Express server.

It ships almost nothing beyond routing and middleware, so authentication, validation, data access and error handling are all decisions you make and libraries you assemble. G2 reviewers name that same property as the main complaint: customisation is complex because there is no convention to fall back on. Typing is the other gap, with reviewers reporting that debugging a large Express codebase is slow without compile-time checks, which is much of the reason NestJS and TypeScript-first alternatives exist. The default X-Powered-By header is a smaller example of the same philosophy, a default most teams end up overriding.

For a full-stack React application, often yes: Next.js route handlers cover the backend work many teams used Express.js for. For a standalone API, or a service that is not rendering React, Express.js remains the simpler fit. In our data the two rarely appear together, with Next.js co-occurring on just 4.23% of Express.js domains, so the common pattern is one or the other rather than Express serving a Next front end. A Next.js server also sends its own X-Powered-By value, so a site that moves across leaves this dataset rather than appearing in both.

Over the tracked window 292 domains moved from Express.js to Nuxt.js and 214 came the other way, the busiest corridor and the only large one running against Express.js. Against Microsoft ASP.NET the flow favours Express.js by roughly 3.2 to 1, 139 arriving against 43 leaving. Ruby on Rails is close to even at 71 in and 83 out, while SvelteKit appears only as an exit with 43 departures. One caveat on Nuxt.js: a Nuxt application is often served by a Node.js server, so part of that corridor is a stack being rearranged rather than Express.js being replaced.

Cloudflare is the most common at 52.83%, followed by Google Analytics (45.60%), Tailwind CSS (40.16%), core-js (34.88%) and jQuery (29.59%). Client-side frameworks are fragmented: React Router 17.61%, React 15.83%, Angular 9.42%, Vue.js 6.02% and Next.js 4.23%. That spread is what you would expect from an unopinionated server that dictates nothing about the front end. Radix UI (22.03%) and shadcn/ui (14.72%) show the newer component-library wave arriving in Express.js codebases.

The evidence says yes, in a specific shape. Detected domains include Ford, TD Bank, Cisco, Salesforce, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Schlumberger, Baker Hughes, Mercedes-Benz and the World Bank, and in nearly every case the header appears on a subdomain such as marketplace.cisco.com, appexchange.salesforce.com or commerce.slb.com rather than on the main site. Express.js is used for the application layer inside a large estate, not for the corporate web presence. Enterprises that adopt it usually bring their own conventions, since the framework supplies none.

Among enriched companies the leaders are Software Development (6.47%), Technology, Information and Internet (5.61%) and IT Services and IT Consulting (5.40%). Real Estate is fourth at 4.52%, higher than most people would guess, and probably reflects property listing portals rather than agencies. Financial Services (3.56%), Business Consulting and Services (3.21%), Retail (2.80%) and Advertising Services (2.65%) follow. No single industry passes 7%, which is consistent with a general-purpose HTTP layer rather than a vertical tool.

Express 5.0 shipped in September 2024 after a long development cycle, and Express 5.1 became the default install on npm in March 2025. Express 4.x is still what most production deployments run and remains supported. The version makes no difference to how Express.js is detected here: both major lines send the same X-Powered-By: Express header by default.