ASP.NET
Hacker ApprovedRanked 10 of 63 web frameworks by recommenders
Free Microsoft web framework for C# praised for maturity, built-in features and scalability; critics find it heavy on ceremony.
Free Microsoft web framework for C# praised for maturity, built-in features and scalability; critics find it heavy on ceremony.
52 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 42
- criticize it
- 10
- approval share
- 81%
Recommended in 12 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 7 years
Median of the 4 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it carries the badge
- 42 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 4.2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Mature, stable and well designed
“is a solid, fast, secure, and mature technology, and it's only getting better”
Comment from 18 Dec 2025 in “Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review” “The mature frameworks (e.g. ASP.NET with razor pages) are great.”
Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “Programming the Commodore 64 with .NET” “much more mature, complete, and with one of the best ORMs”
Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “The history of C# and TypeScript with Anders Hejlsberg | GitHub” - Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “Programming the Commodore 64 with .NET”
- Comment from 21 May 2026 in “Python 3.15: features that didn't make the headlines”
Batteries included, few dependencies
“You barely need any dependencies other than aspnetcore and efcore for most applications and your AI knows them well.”
Comment from 12 May 2026 in “If AI Writes Your Code, Why Use Python?” “Modern ASP.NET handles so much for you it's a lot like Rails in that regard”
Comment from 12 Nov 2025 in “.NET 10” “being able to easily justify the use of out of the box ASP.NET Core”
Comment from 24 Mar 2026 in “Sunsetting the Techempower Framework Benchmarks” - Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “Programming the Commodore 64 with .NET”
Strong ecosystem and EF Core
“great ecosystem (orleans, ef core, aspire, asp.net core, blazor, signalr, etc)”
Comment from 8 Jan 2026 in “C# is programming language of the year 2025” “much more mature, complete, and with one of the best ORMs”
Comment from 1 Feb 2026 in “The history of C# and TypeScript with Anders Hejlsberg | GitHub” “AspNetCore startup code, LINQ and EF are good examples.”
Comment from 2 Jun 2026 in “Why Custom Attributes in .NET Give Me Nightmares” Well-known patterns AI agents follow
“You barely need any dependencies other than aspnetcore and efcore for most applications and your AI knows them well.”
Comment from 12 May 2026 in “If AI Writes Your Code, Why Use Python?” “which allow my agent to easily follow decades of best practiced patterns”
Comment from 18 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: Sphinx – A hook that quizzes you on your AI's code before shipping” “allow my agent to easily follow decades of best practiced patterns”
Comment from 18 Oct 2026 in “Show HN: Sphinx – A hook that quizzes you on your AI's code before shipping”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Magic and ceremony hide behavior
“You had to change how your web app behaved completely if you relied on their magic session”
Comment from 26 Nov 2025 in “Reinventing how .NET builds and ships (again)” “to use that stuff a lot of ceremony is baked in”
Comment from 12 Nov 2025 in “.NET 10” Confusing history and buzzwords
“Asp.net (framework which were sold as "web for backed developers") looked like evil joke.”
Comment from 7 Mar 2026 in “I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has ignited a passion again” “ASP.NET has the dubious honor of featuring two generations of MS buzzwords”
Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “Microsoft's Pivotal AI Product Is Running into Big Problems” “ASP manages to be confusing quite often.”
Comment from 25 Mar 2026 in “I Forked Httpx”
Other web frameworks people recommend
The four most recommended other web frameworks, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ruby on Rails | 337 | 145 | 70% | 12 | 14 yrs38 owners | Approved |
| Django | 277 | 97 | 74% | 12 | 15 yrs38 owners | Approved |
| Next.js | 127 | 256 | 33% | 12 | 3 yrs6 owners | — |
| Phoenix Framework | 85 | 11 | 89% | 12 | 8 yrs7 owners | Approved |
| ASP.NETThis page | 42 | 10 | 81% | 12 | 7 yrs4 owners | Approved |
What people said
40 of the 58 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I even have a preference for web stores which use ASP.NET or Java”
“switch to secure technologies like Java, ASP.NET or Rust”
“which allow my agent to easily follow decades of best practiced patterns”
“allow my agent to easily follow decades of best practiced patterns”
“I get a lot of work done in asp.net and winforms in a pleasant way”
“Your code will typically depend for 98% on official, trusted and vetted code”
“AspNetCore startup code, LINQ and EF are good examples.”
“using asp.net core exclusively on Linux servers since 2017”
“But the stack is solid. I'm always reminded of Stack Overflow and how they built on asp.net and like 7 servers and it scaled very well for years.”
“ASP.NET is mature and (IMO) well designed”
“You barely need any dependencies other than aspnetcore and efcore for most applications and your AI knows them well.”
“We eventually replaced that with an ASP.Net design in C#, which was a whole lot more manageable.”
“I really don't understand why people complain about Spring or ASP.NET annotations”
“Asp.net 10 and vertical slice architecture is good and clean”
“It was a well-integrated combo that appealed to a lot of shops.”
“ASP manages to be confusing quite often.”
“being able to easily justify the use of out of the box ASP.NET Core”
“I write a lot of web backends in C#/ASP.NET (on Linux deploying to k8s) and it's great!”
“Asp.net (framework which were sold as "web for backed developers") looked like evil joke.”
“We're using ASP.NET Razor Pages, Web API, backend services”
“ASP.NET has the dubious honor of featuring two generations of MS buzzwords”
“for many enterprise web applications ASP.NET works well”
“much more mature, complete, and with one of the best ORMs”
“it’s easier to create something more complex with aspnetcore”
“great ecosystem (orleans, ef core, aspire, asp.net core, blazor, signalr, etc)”
“is a solid, fast, secure, and mature technology, and it's only getting better”
“You had to change how your web app behaved completely if you relied on their magic session”
“at worst ~20x (Django) than asp.net on the techempower benchmarks”
“this section is just about the built-in web framework asp.net”
“There is only one relevant web framework: ASP.NET Core.”
“ASP.NET is stable and really good web framework”
“good enough that you don't need anything 3rd party”
“The mature frameworks (e.g. ASP.NET with razor pages) are great.”
“performs very well today in the metric compared to any other comparable framework”
“Modern ASP.NET handles so much for you it's a lot like Rails in that regard”
“to use that stuff a lot of ceremony is baked in”
“I also found Asp.net to have significantly less undebuggable magic than Spring.”
“I've been working with ASP.NET web apps for half a decade so far”
“Java's webserver beats ASP.NET in performance benchmarks but .net's one performance is good enough”
“We all use apps built with these every day without even realizing it.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.