Bun vs Node vs Deno for Indie Hackers in 2026

Originally published at devtoolpicks.com

Every benchmark post will tell you Bun is four times faster than Node. The charts are real. They're also close to meaningless for the app you're actually building.

Here's the thing nobody leads with: once your request does real work, hitting a database, validating input, running your business logic, the gap between Bun, Node, and Deno mostly disappears. Independent tests of production-style apps put all three within a few percent of each other. The dramatic numbers come from benchmarks that respond to an HTTP request with an empty "Hello World" and nothing else. Your users don't pay you for empty handlers.

So the runtime choice in 2026 isn't really about req/s. It's about ecosystem fit, developer experience, security posture, and where you deploy. All three are genuinely production-ready now. And there's a fresh twist this year worth knowing before you pick: Anthropic bought Bun in December 2025, its first acquisition ever, and Claude Code now ships as a Bun binary. That changes the "is Bun safe to bet on" math in a way it didn't a year ago. Let me break down where each one actually wins, with the hype stripped out.

The Quick Verdict

Short version: Node is the safe default. Bun is the speed and DX upgrade. Deno is the security and edge specialist. Most indie hackers should stay on Node unless they have a specific reason to move.

Do the Benchmarks Even Matter?

This is the part to internalize before you read another comparison. There are two completely different stories depending on what you measure.

Synthetic benchmarks, the empty HTTP handler kind, show big gaps. Bun's startup-optimized JavaScriptCore engine pulls ahead, sometimes by multiples. Real-world benchmarks, where the handler parses a request, queries a database, and serializes a response, show all three converging to nearly the same number. The reason is simple: in a real app, your runtime isn't the bottleneck. Your database query is. A runtime that's "3x faster" at returning a string saves you nothing when 90% of the request time is spent waiting on Postgres.

Where speed differences are real and do matter:

Cold starts. Bun launches in roughly 8 to 15 ms, against Deno's 40 to 60 ms and Node's 60 to 120 ms. On serverless, that's a direct cut to your invocation latency and your bill.

Install and CI speed. Bun installs a fresh dependency tree in about a second where npm takes tens of seconds. Run that across every CI build and the time savings are real money.

So don't pick a runtime for its req/s. Pick it for cold starts if you're serverless, for CI speed if your pipeline is slow, or for ecosystem and stability if you just want to ship. Whatever you build on, it'll likely run one of Next.js, Nuxt, or SvelteKit on top, and those frameworks run on all three now.

Node.js

Node is the one that just works, everywhere, with everything. It's 17 years old, it runs the majority of backend JavaScript in production, and it owns the ecosystem outright. There's no "95% compatible" caveat because npm is Node's ecosystem. All 2 million-plus packages, every tutorial, every Stack Overflow answer, every APM tool. When something breaks at 3am, Node has the deepest pool of tooling and answers to pull from.

The current Long Term Support line is Node 24, released in October 2025, with a 30-month support window under the OpenJS Foundation. Node 24 also finally added native TypeScript execution, so you can run a .ts file directly without tsx or ts-node by stripping the type annotations before execution. That closes one of the few real gaps against Bun and Deno.

Who should skip it? If cold starts or CI speed are your bottleneck, Node is the slowest of the three and you'll feel it. It also leaves you to assemble your own toolchain: a bundler, a test runner, a TypeScript setup. Bun and Deno hand you those in the box. And the historical ESM versus CommonJS module friction, while much improved, can still bite on older packages. But for a normal SaaS where you want zero surprises and maximum hireability, Node is the boring, correct answer. As one developer put it, if you're a bank, use Node.

Bun

Bun is the speed-and-experience play, and in 2026 it's the most interesting of the three. It's built on JavaScriptCore, the engine behind Safari, with a core written in Zig, and it bundles everything into one binary: runtime, package manager, bundler, and test runner. No more gluing five tools together. It also ships built-in clients for Postgres, Redis, and S3, and Bun.serve for a fast HTTP server. Compatibility with Node sits around 95%, so Express, Fastify, NestJS, and ORMs like Prisma and Drizzle generally run unchanged. It runs natively on Windows and ARM64 now too.

The big 2026 development: Anthropic acquired Bun in December 2025. It was Anthropic's first acquisition, and the reason is direct. Claude Code ships as a single Bun executable to millions of developers, so Bun is the infrastructure their billion-dollar product runs on. Bun stays open source and MIT-licensed, the same team keeps building it in public, and Anthropic now has a strong incentive to keep it fast and stable. For anyone who avoided Bun because they worried a small startup might abandon it, that abandonment risk just dropped a lot. If you already lean on Claude Code as a solo developer, you're effectively running Bun already.

Want to try it without betting your production app on it? The low-risk path is to adopt Bun where speed is pure upside. Run bun install instead of npm, bun test instead of your test runner, and your dev scripts through Bun, while keeping Node in production. You get the CI and developer-experience wins right away, and you can switch the production runtime later once you've watched your metrics for a couple of days.

Who should skip it? It's still not Node-perfect. Some native C++ addons need workarounds, and developers report that chasing a memory leak or profiling a service is rougher than it is on Node, where the tooling is more polished. There's also a fair question about whether Bun's roadmap now tilts toward Anthropic's CLI priorities over general-purpose server needs. None of that is a dealbreaker for most apps, but test your full dependency tree before you migrate anything that matters.

Deno

Deno was built by Ryan Dahl, the person who created Node, specifically to fix the things he felt he got wrong the first time. Its headline feature is security by default. A Deno program starts with zero permissions: no file system, no network, no environment variables, until you explicitly grant them with flags like --allow-net. After the npm supply-chain attacks of 2025, that posture stopped looking paranoid and started looking smart. A compromised package can't quietly phone home if you never gave it network access.

Beyond security, Deno is the most complete toolkit out of the box. It runs TypeScript natively, follows web standards closely, and is the only one of the three that ships a built-in formatter and linter alongside its test runner. Deno 2 also fixed the thing that used to kill it for most people: npm compatibility. It now reads package.json, works with node_modules, and runs the large majority of npm packages directly. Pair that with Deno Deploy, its first-party edge platform with built-in KV storage, and you get a genuinely fast path to globally distributed functions.

Who should skip it? The ecosystem is still the smallest of the three. Compatibility is around 95%, so you'll occasionally hit a package that leans on native C++ bindings or obscure Node internals and needs --allow-all or a workaround. Fewer developers know Deno, which matters for hiring and for finding answers. And the permission model, while a security win, adds a little friction to everyday scripting. If security or edge deployment is central to what you're building, those tradeoffs are worth it. If not, the smaller ecosystem is a real cost.

Where Do the Three Actually Differ?

Strip away the marketing and the genuine differences come down to four things.

One more thing has quietly changed the stakes. All three runtimes now implement a shared set of web-standard APIs through WinterCG, the community group standardizing things like fetch, Request, and Response across runtimes. Write a fetch handler today and it runs on Node, Bun, and Deno without changes. That turns runtime choice from a one-way door into an engineering tradeoff. You can develop on Bun for speed, test on Node for compatibility, and deploy a Deno edge function, all from the same codebase. The walls between these runtimes are lower than they've ever been.

How Do You Choose the Right One?

Start with your constraint, not the benchmark chart.

View the interactive diagram on devtoolpicks.com

Concrete scenarios. Building a standard SaaS and you want to ship without thinking about your runtime? Node 24 LTS, every time. Starting fresh and you care about fast CI, quick cold starts, and not juggling five tools? Bun is a strong default now, and the Anthropic backing means it's a safer bet than it was. Handling sensitive data, running code you don't fully trust, or going edge-first? Deno's security model earns its keep. And wherever you land, your deployment target matters too, which I broke down in Railway vs Render vs Fly.io.

The Verdict: Which Should You Use?

For most indie hackers, use Node.js. Node 24 LTS is genuinely the best version ever shipped, it has native TypeScript now, and nothing else comes close on ecosystem depth, tooling, and the simple fact that everything works. Boring is a feature when you're a solo founder who needs to sleep.

Reach for Bun when speed and developer experience are worth a small amount of risk. Greenfield projects, performance-sensitive services, slow CI pipelines, and serverless functions where cold starts hit your bill all benefit. The Anthropic acquisition removed the biggest reason people held back, which was abandonment risk. Just test your dependencies first.

Choose Deno when security is a real requirement, not a nice-to-have. Fintech, healthcare, anything running untrusted code, or an edge-first architecture where Deno Deploy fits. The secure-by-default model and the cleanest built-in toolchain are the payoff for accepting a smaller ecosystem.

The honest meta-point is that the runtime war is basically over, and the winner is that you no longer have to pick just one. Thanks to shared web standards, you can develop on the fastest one, deploy on the most compatible one, and reach for the secure one where it counts. For a bootstrapped founder shipping a product, though, the simplest advice still holds: use Node unless you have a reason not to, and let the reason, not the benchmark, make the call. Running something interesting on Bun or Deno? Tell me how it's going over on @devtoolpicks.