// the find
poem-web/poem
A full-featured and easy-to-use web framework with the Rust programming language.
Poem is a Rust web framework built on Tokio and hyper, positioned as a higher-level alternative to Axum with batteries included. It ships `poem-openapi` for derive-macro-driven OpenAPI spec generation, plus gRPC, Lambda, and now MCP server support in the same monorepo. Aimed at Rust developers who want more built-in functionality than Axum offers without writing boilerplate.
The `poem-openapi` crate is the standout feature — you derive your API schema from Rust types and get a Swagger UI and spec file for free, which is genuinely useful and not just a thin wrapper. The monorepo approach means gRPC and HTTP can share middleware and extractors without an impedance mismatch. `#![forbid(unsafe_code)]` is enforced project-wide, which matters for a framework where downstream code trusts your memory handling. The example coverage is unusually thorough — ACME cert renewal, OpenTelemetry, CSRF, tower layer interop — these are the cases that bite you in production and most frameworks leave them undocumented.
Adoption is thin compared to Axum, which has become the de facto standard; ecosystem crates (auth, ORM integrations, observability) target Axum first, and you'll often be porting rather than plugging in. The proc-macro-heavy API in `poem-openapi` makes compile times visibly worse and error messages when you misuse a derive are often cryptic — you'll spend time reading macro internals. Documentation beyond the examples is sparse; the API docs exist but there's no prose guide explaining design decisions or how extractors compose, so newcomers are left reading source code. Last push was May 2026 but activity has been declining — the maintainer is responsive to issues but there's essentially one primary contributor, which is a bus-factor problem for a framework you'd put in production.