As a backend developers, we know that frameworks are very important in our day-to-day software development. Choosing the right framework for your projects in 2021 is also an essential skill as your project may grow and as increases demand.

In as much as there are numerous frameworks used by different developers across the world, there are only a handful of these backend frameworks that remain formidable and have the ability to deploy a large and scalable application.

In this article, I will look at the top five backend frameworks to give you an insight into what you can start learning in 2021.

Top 5 backend frameworks 2021

1. Laravel
2. Django
3. Spring Boot
4. Ruby on Rails
5. Express

Laravel

Laravel is a PHP MVC framework for web artisans.

It’s a web application framework with a beautiful and elegant syntax. It is also an open-source framework for building simple to complex web applications following the MVC architectural pattern.

PHP powers over 79.1% percent of all websites across the internet. Laravel is one of the most popular frameworks of PHP, this makes Laravel to stand out as a framework to learn in 2021. Laravel provides easy development, enjoyable, and good software development practices. It also takes away pains in software development by providing a different abstraction to popular development tasks such as:

Routing Engine:

Laravel provides a simple and straightforward routing engine to ease the development process of a developer.

Dependency Injection:

Laravel provides a powerful dependency injection container that allows developers to plug in any Service, Class, and module.

Multiple Session and Cache Engines:

Laravel provides easy to navigate session and cache engines with different popular cache and session engines supported out of the box.

Eloquent Database ORM:

This is one of the most powerful features of Laravel, Eloquent takes away the pain of manually handling database away and provides an easy to use ORM. Check out the complete guide on Laravel relationships to give you a clear picture of how Laravel handles database operations easily.

Database Schema Migration:

With Laravel’s Schema, you don’t need to write a single SQL to create a database schema/table because Laravel handles all that out of the box.

Django

Django is a high-level python web framework that is built with Speed, Security, and Scalability at its core.

It also encourages RAD (Rapid Application Development ) using clean, pragmatic software design. Built by more experienced developers to facilitate the application development process by taking away plenty of web development hassles. When building larger projects with Django it allows you to harness the full power of the framework. Django has many sweet features that make it stand out from other frameworks, read on for more!

Ridiculously Fast:

Django framework is built with speed in mind, developers can build complex and large applications in no time.

Security:

Security is primary in Django as it helps developers to avoid some securities pitfalls.

Scalability:

Scalability is primary in the framework making it easy for web applications to scale efficiently.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot is an open-source Java-based framework for creating standalone, production-ready Spring-based applications.

The Spring framework is a Java-based framework and inversion of control container for the Java platform. According to W3techs, Java is the fourth most used server-side language in all websites making Spring Boot a top choice for Java-based companies. If you are a Java developer learning the Spring framework is a must for your career.

The Java Spring Boot has many great features that allow developers to write clean, and elegant Java codes, such as:

• You can create stand-alone Spring applications that can be deployed on a different server and scaled independently.
• Embedded Tomcat server, jetty, and others out of the box, no need to write any complex WAR files for configuration.
• Spring boot provides a starter template to get you started quickly with dependencies to simplify your build configurations.
• It also provides automatic configurations for Spring and third-party libraries.

Ruby on Rails

ROR (Ruby on Rails) is a new member of our top 5 backend frameworks family. Recently there has been a major rise in the Ruby community. It is currently the 3rd most used server-side language on all websites according to W3Techs.

Ruby on Rails is an open-source web application framework that is based on the Ruby programming language. Developers using Ruby on Rails are encouraged to used MVC patterns and the DRY software principle. If you have worked with Django and Ruby on Rails before, you will notice similarities in principles but different programming languages.

There are many features that make Ruby on Rails stands out from other frameworks such as:

1. It offers clean syntax and easy to understand the codebase.
2. ROR provides clean ORM using Active Record
3. It has a massive and large community of developers for assistance.
4. You can easily build and deploy small projects and scale them to larger ones easily.

Express

According to the StackOverflow 2020 Survey, JavaScript is the most popular language with about 67.7% of respondents that including the Frontend and Backend parts of JavaScript.

But according to W3Techs, Server-side (Backend) JavaScript currently powers only about 1.1% of all websites. The JavaScript community is gaining this popularity on the Server Side with Node.js. Expressjs a go-to framework when using Node.js for Backend development. Express is a fast, unopinionated, and minimalist JavaScript framework for Node.js. It’s a flexible Nodejs web framework for building a robust set of features in web and mobile applications with Node.js.

Expressjs has great features that can speed up your development process with Node.js such as:

1. Good routing systems used by other frameworks.
2. The setup process only requires installing the library through an NPM command.
3. Expressjs has a large number of predefined plugins and libraries you can install to achieve almost anything.
4. Express also has a very large community and users therefore, you won’t be stuck for so long in a bug.

Bonus

For reading this long, I have a reward for you. Below is a list of 5 backend frameworks also worth checking out in 2021

1. ASP .NET Core
2. CakePHP
3. Flask
4. Phoenix
5. Nest.js

Final Thoughts

In this article, we covered the top five backend frameworks of 2021 and the different features that make them stand out. Choosing a particular framework for your project will solely depend on the type of project you are undertaking, as well as the programming language and team strength. It is most likely that you’re familiar with JavaScript already as a beginner so I will encourage you to delve into Expressjs immediately, in my opinion.

Furthermore, if you’re coming from a PHP or OOP background and you’re looking at learning a framework, start with Laravel immediately. Learning Laravel or Express may be easy to get a job and start making money while you learn others as needed. After learning the above frameworks, you can decide to choose anyone from the list and further as it is required.

Let me know in the comment section, which backend framework you will learn first in 2021 and which was your first backend framework, and why. Happy coding!