Actix-web or Rocket? Comparing Rust Web Frameworks

Rocket

Rocket is one of the most mature frameworks available for Rust. By using Rocket, you can write fast and secure web applications without compromising on speed, usability, and flexibility.

More can be learned about Rocket using its documentation.

PROS:

• Easy to use — Rust’s code generation tools are extensively used to provide a clean API
• Query Strings — Handling query strings and parameters is a breeze using Rocket
• Streams — Size isn’t a concern as Rocket streams all incoming and outgoing data
• Templating — Rocket has a built-in template support
• Extensible — you can create your own primitives easily, so that any Rocket app can use them
• Type Safe —It type checks route URLs, i.e it ensures that type errors are kept to a minimum
• Boilerplate Free — No need for a boiler plate code, a clean API can be easily provided using Rust’s code generation tools
• Testing Library — Using the built-in testing library, it runs unit tests on your applications with ease
• Config Environments — You can configure your application your own way for development, staging, and production
• Cookies — Hassle free viewing, adding, and removal of cookies, with or without encryption
• API Calls — Out of the box JSON support. By deriving Deserialize or Serialize you can receive or return JSON, respectively.
• Form Handling — Simplistic form handling through which bad form requests are filtered so your code doesn’t crash. By deriving FromForm for your structure, you can let Rocket know which parameter to use. It will then parse and validate the form request, create the structure, and then call your function

CONS:

• Nightly — Only works on Nightly version of Rust.
• No Async/Await support
• Batteries included opinionated approach. Can make customization difficult.
• Slower than actix, per the benchmarks.
• No native websocket support.

Actix-web

Actix Web lets you quickly and confidently develop web services in Rust . It is a minimalist, much less opinionated.

PROS:

• Type safe —Just like Rocket, Actix provides type safety and ensures that type errors are minimal
• Async/Await first design out of the box.
• Blazingly Fast — It is in fact within top three of fastest web-frameworks in production, trouncing nearly all other web-frameworks in any language by a wide margin.
• Feature Rich — Features like WebSockets, HTTP/2, pipelining, logging, etc. are provided out of the box.
• Extensible — you can create your own libraries that any Actix application can use
• Minimalist – Means more easy to customize with your exact requirements.
• Runs on stable Rust
• Huge ecosystem of crates
• Seen the most production usage out of all Rust web frameworks as of 2021.

CONS:

• Some controversy — There was some unwanted controversy regarding unsafe code usage. While “unsafe” pattern is common in Rust internals like RefCell, the way Actix lead maintainer reacted to some issues caused controversy. Actix has a new maintainer and things are going smooth.
• Bit more boilerplate code needed.