Companies Using Express.js

Before any number on this page means anything, you need to know how Express.js is found. There is one signal: the X-Powered-By: Express response header. Express sets it by default, and its own security guide tells you how to turn it off. As of our October 2026 crawl, 173,534 live domains still send it, and we matched 80,983 of them to a company.

1. What 173,534 actually counts

The count covers Express.js deployments that still announce themselves. Removing the header takes one line, app.disable('x-powered-by'), and Helmet strips it by default. The bias isn't random: the better-hardened the deployment, the less likely it is to be here. So 173,534 is a floor whose gap to the real number is widest inside mature engineering teams.

The same header is also the clearest view of Node.js we have. Our rule for Node.js itself matches 7 domains, and Koa, the only other Node framework we identify from a header, matches 4. So this list doubles as the list of companies running Node.js with Express, with two blind spots: Node apps built on something else, and Express apps that removed the header. NestJS apps are mostly inside it, because NestJS uses its Express adapter by default.

Sales Signal: A hit tells you two things: the site runs Node.js, and nobody has trimmed its response headers. If you sell application security, API gateways or header audits, the second fact is the qualifier. A miss tells you nothing, so never read absence from this list as proof a company isn't on Node.js.

2. Five months of chart

The series runs from 90,377 domains in June 2026 to 117,761 in July, 138,238 in August, 165,615 in September and 173,534 in October. Don't read that as adoption. The set of domains we crawl turns over every month, with dead sites dropping out and new ones found, and our detection has reached further over the same months. The level is the useful number. Over the same window, 32,499 domains stopped sending the header since March 16, 2026, and some of those are teams that switched it off, not teams that left Express.

On the vendor side the project is active: Express 5.0.0 shipped on September 9, 2024, 5.1.0 became the default npm release on March 31, 2025, per the Express blog, and expressjs.com showed 5.2.1 when we checked on October 11, 2026.

"173,534 sites still announce Express in a response header in October 2026. The ones that took it off are still running it; they just stopped telling us." - David Thomson, TechnologyChecker.io

Sales Signal: "Is Express still used?" is answered by the level, 173,534 domains, not by the slope. Pitch Express teams on the work in front of them, such as upgrades and header hardening, rather than on a market that's supposedly leaving.

3. Where it sits in the category

8.44% of Web Frameworks, 4th of 89. The table deserves suspicion, because each row is found with a different instrument. Microsoft ASP.NET leads with 906,811 domains partly because it can be matched on cookies, __VIEWSTATE markup, several headers and .aspx URLs. Express.js has one header. Ruby on Rails (241,931) and Nuxt.js (210,562) sit above it, Laravel (96,829) below. All real counts, none directly comparable.

4. Who the enterprise names really are

Ford, Domino's, TD Bank, Intuit, Mercedes-Benz, Salesforce, SLB, Baker Hughes, Boston Scientific, the World Bank. The hostnames matter more than the logos: accountmanager.ford.com, accounts.intuit.com, commerce.slb.com, store.bakerhughes.com, media.mercedes-benz.com. Express.js is rarely the flagship domain. Express runs the account portal, the parts store, the newsroom.

Two clusters need care. The partner marketplaces of Cisco, HPE GreenLake, Workday and Infor all carry "Powered by AppDirect" in their pages, so those four Express headers are one platform vendor's choice. And the World Bank's and the FAO's open knowledge repositories both carry the DSpace page shell, the same repository software at two institutions.

Sales Signal: The buyer for an Express.js hostname is the team that owns that application, not the corporate web team. For the AppDirect marketplaces, the buyer is AppDirect.

5. Overlap, and why there is no migration table

Every corridor between Express.js and another framework failed our still-both test, so this page shows none. Next.js is the biggest neighbour: 7,686 domains run both right now, 70.54% of the 10,896 that ever did. Since March 16, 2026, 2,473 domains dropped the Express header while running Next.js and 503 dropped Next.js while keeping Express. With seven in ten pairs still in place, that looks like stacks being rearranged. Nuxt.js is stickier still: 5,393 domains run both, 82.31% of the 6,552 that ever did. Against Microsoft ASP.NET, 246 domains dropped ASP.NET while running Express and 99 went the other way, numbers too small to call a trend.

"Seven in ten sites that ever ran Express and Next.js together still run both. That's a stack with two layers, and I wouldn't sell it as a migration." - David Thomson, TechnologyChecker.io

Sales Signal: The 7,686 Express-plus-Next.js domains are full-stack JavaScript shops with a separate API layer. API tooling, observability and gateway products fit them better than a framework pitch.

6. The stack around it

Cloudflare fronts 51.89% of the 174,576 live Express domains in our stack analysis, and the header passes straight through it, as the Cloudflare-fronted Cisco and Workday marketplaces show. Nginx is on 18.3% and Amazon Web Services on 15.86%. The front ends don't agree: React Router 19.92%, React 13.14%, Angular 8.84%, Vue.js 6.35%. core-js (32.32%) and jQuery (27.61%) are still common.

Sales Signal: Don't pitch these teams a stack. Pitch a component that sits behind whatever they run, and lead with Cloudflare compatibility, since half of them already use it.

7. Who these companies are

Small companies dominate. 65.52% have 1 to 10 employees and 21.65% have 11 to 50, so 87.17% of the 75,261 with a known headcount are under 51 people, despite the enterprise names above. By industry, Software Development (6.18%), IT Services and IT Consulting (5.36%) and Technology, Information and Internet (5.29%) lead, with Real Estate fourth at 4.41%. By age, 74.30% were founded in 2010 or later. The United States leads with 27,096 matched companies, and India (5,058) is within 113 of the United Kingdom (5,171).

Sales Signal: India and Brazil (4,207) together hold 9,265 Express companies. Developer tools priced for those markets have a ready list here.

8. What G2 reviewers say

Praise clusters on middleware setup, documentation, flexibility and light weight; the complaints are complex customization and slow debugging without strong typing. Each theme has one mention, seven in all, so read it as flavour. The pattern still lines up with the NestJS default above: teams that want structure and types on Express pick a framework that adds them.

Sales Signal: TypeScript tooling, validation and structured logging answer both G2 complaints. Lead with debugging time, which is the cost reviewers name.

9. Key takeaways

1. Size: 173,534 domains in October 2026, a floor, 4th of 89 in Web Frameworks at 8.44%.
2. Node.js proxy: Express is the Node.js framework we see most often by header; Koa shows on 4 domains.
3. Shape: enterprise use is application-level, and four marketplace names are one AppDirect platform.
4. Neighbours: Next.js and Nuxt.js overlap rather than replace it.
5. Customers: 87.17% of matched companies have 50 or fewer staff.

10. Sales applications

Targeting: filter for Express.js plus Cloudflare, 11 to 50 employees and a 2015 to 2020 founding date. Companies in that cohort are past the prototype stage. The hostname tells you the team: store. or commerce. means ecommerce, accounts. or identity. means platform engineering.

Angle: "Your app on [hostname] still returns the default X-Powered-By header. Harmless on its own, but it usually means nobody has reviewed the response headers." The prospect can verify that in one request.

What not to do: never tell a prospect they aren't on Express.js because they're missing from this list. The careful teams are the ones most likely to be missing. Every figure here comes from TechnologyChecker.io's October 2026 crawl: 173,534 live Express.js domains, 80,983 matched to company records.