Echo

Routing, middleware, request binding, validation, and template rendering. That's it. No ORM, no migration tool, no opinions about your database.

MIT license. The benchmarks put Echo among the fastest Go web frameworks. Optimized router using a radix tree, automatic TLS via Let's Encrypt, HTTP/2 support, and a middleware ecosystem (CORS, JWT, logging, rate limiting, gzip) that covers the common needs.

Fully free. No paid tier, no hosted version. A Go module you import. Every team size: free. Echo's performance means you rarely think about framework overhead; your bottleneck will be your business logic or database, not the HTTP layer.

The catch: Go's web framework landscape is crowded. Gin has more stars (83K) and a larger community. Fiber (which uses Fasthttp instead of net/http) benchmarks even faster. Chi is closer to the standard library. Echo sits in a comfortable middle: more batteries than Chi, less middleware than Gin, standard net/http under the hood. The choice between Echo, Gin, and Chi mostly comes down to API preference. If you're new to Go web frameworks, Gin's larger community means more tutorials and StackOverflow answers.