42Crunch API Protection vs express-brute: 2026 Comparison

express-brute

Express-brute is built for Node.js teams protecting REST APIs where a lightweight, stateless rate-limiting layer is enough to stop credential stuffing and basic brute-force attacks at the route level. The 568 GitHub stars and active maintenance reflect real production use in shops that don't need distributed state or advanced behavioral analysis. Skip this if you're running microservices at scale or need account lockout logic that survives service restarts; express-brute stores attempt counts in memory, which breaks across load-balanced instances without external persistence configured.