Encore Reviews & Product Details

We are currently migrating our tech stack in our currently and decided to try out Encore TS. So far, I've beed quite impressed by it.

- We don't have to worry about dev-ops. With it's IaC every service, database, etc... you want to create, will automatically be detected and created by encore. Therefore, you can create distributed systems out of the box.

- Super fast API responses.

- Very AI friendly, from the start you can use cursor rules provided to give context to the LLMs you use.

- Automatic swagger-like documentation, also automatically detected and created by the framework.

- No boilerplate stuff.

- Super helpful creator team. Any question you have will quickly be answered on their Discord.

- Leap. You can create complete Encore apps with just using prompts. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Being quite new, sometimes there are some features or documentation missing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What really stood out to me about Encore is how much it takes the stress out of backend development. I’m not an expert in cloud infrastructure, but Encore just handles so much of the setup for me. I love how quickly I can get a new project running and see real results—no more getting stuck on endless configuration or deployment issues.

The local development experience is smooth, and I really appreciate being able to see my APIs documented automatically. It’s honestly saved me a lot of headaches. The community is friendly and responsive, which makes it easy to ask questions and learn as I go.

Overall, Encore has made me actually enjoy working on backend projects, and I’d happily recommend it to friends or colleagues who want to spend less time on boilerplate and more time building cool things. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While Encore makes things much easier overall, there are a few things I wish were better. Sometimes, the magic that makes things simple can also feel a bit restrictive—especially if I want to customise things outside of the Encore way. There’s a bit of a learning curve if you’re used to doing everything manually, and occasionally the documentation doesn’t cover every edge case I run into.

I’ve also noticed that some advanced features or integrations aren’t fully supported yet, so I’ve had to find workarounds for certain use cases. Because Encore is still growing, there are times when I run into issues that require waiting for updates or community help. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The biggest win for our team is not having to worry about infrastructure. We write code, press merge, and Encore makes sure it’s deployed and running for our users, with no extra tooling. For a team of a lot of junior-level developers with the budget and time constraints of a startup, this has been a huge plus. We feel like we can ship faster.

The local dev environment is super easy to work with and behaves just like the cloud, which means less surprise bugs. The built-in traces view is great for debugging and helps us move faster.

When we've run into issues—or just needed help understanding how something works—we've gotten solid support from the Encore team. They are very helpful and active on Discord.

We're using Encore with GCP, and that setup has been smooth. The recent updates to the cloud dashboard, especially around infrastructure visibility and config, have made GCP a lot nicer to deal with.

It also plays nicely with our Next.js frontend on Vercel. The type-safe API client Encore generates has been really helpful, it gives us confidence that everything works all the way from the browser to the database at compile time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Encore API can feel a bit restrictive at times. You can’t return any HTTP status codes without using raw endpoints, and there’s only one auth handler for the whole app. Not dealbreakers, but stuff we hope gets more flexible over time.

The local and cloud could be improved. Better filtering, more useful metrics, alerting, maybe even code coverage would make a difference.

Also, the Encore team doesn't always respond to PRs and issues opened on GitHub. They are much more active on Discord, so I would recommend joining it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Encore offers a superb developer experience. I used it for a side project demo on my YouTube channel, and I was impressed by how quickly I could go from code to a live service. The built-in infrastructure provisioning feels like magic — you define your API, and Encore takes care of the rest. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Encore currently only supports PostgreSQL, which limits its flexibility for teams using other SQL databases like MSSQL or MySQL. In my case, this makes it harder to introduce Encore into my company’s existing architecture. Additionally, I’d love to see better support for integrating with legacy systems or enabling incremental adoption, such as calling existing services or databases more seamlessly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It has been a joy using Encore for our startup. We use the cloud platform to automate our deployment in GCP. Some key benefits we like:

- Active community on Discord, the founders and engineers very active in responding and addressing issues.

- It auto populates all the necessary resources in the cloud.

- Supports both Golang and TS, we used Golang at first then switched to TS and it was smooth.

- Built-in UI for tracing every request and the associated log.

- Domain-driven service architecture that keeps our codebase organized by business context (core, ledger, sync, tenant).

- Seamless local development experience with the encore run command that sets up everything needed.

- Excellent integration with third-party services through its secrets management system.

- Type-safe API client generation that works perfectly with our Next.js frontend.

- Powerful database abstractions that simplify our schema migrations.

- No configuration overhead for CORS handling across different environments.

- Great developer experience with debugging capabilities that significantly speed up troubleshooting.

- Perfect companion to Trigger.dev for background job processing, allowing us to focus on business logic instead of infrastructure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- The database migration system requires stopping and restarting the service locally, which interrupts the development flow.

- TypeScript support is good but still lacks some of the mature tooling available in the Go ecosystem version, e.g. caching and metrics monitoring.

- Limited built-in background processing capabilities necessitated our adoption of Trigger.dev as a separate solution.

- Unable to disable tracing of certain endpoints, e.g. healthcheck. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Encore is extremely helpful to get rid of all the infrastructure coding and dependencies, so called DevOps responsibilities. You can just connect to a postgres, cache or a queue with zero infra code. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Encore only supports TypeScript and Golang officially. I generaly enjoy JVM languages as well. However it lacks JVM support. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Encore's speed compared to Express is simply phenomenal. The performance boost I've experienced since switching has made a noticeable difference in my application's response times. API endpoints that used to take hundreds of milliseconds now respond in tens, creating a much snappier experience for users.

The type-safety that comes built-in with Encore has dramatically reduced runtime errors in production. Having TypeScript integration from the ground up, rather than bolted on as an afterthought, means the compiler catches issues before they ever reach users.

The framework's architectural guidance strikes the perfect balance between flexibility and structure. Encore encourages clean separation of concerns without forcing an overly rigid pattern, making codebases more maintainable as they grow. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The developer experience can be challenging when you need to deviate from Encore's opinionated approach. While the framework excels at the standard path, customizing certain aspects requires more work than with more flexible alternatives.

Documentation, while improving, still has gaps when it comes to advanced use cases. I've found myself diving into source code more than I'd like when implementing complex features.

The smaller community compared to Express means fewer third-party plugins and resources. This occasionally means building custom solutions for problems that would have ready-made answers in more established ecosystems. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Having used Encore to make API backends for a lot of projects recently, I'd say the following things about it:

- It's easier than other frameworks to set up and get started with.

- It includes all the features you'd expect, like tracing, debugging, etc., all within that handy dashboard

- It's fast. I have noticed the response times are blazingly fast.

- Minimal Boilerplate code Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ah, yeah, I'd like if Encore add these features to its roadmap

- Database integrations, I don't always use a relational database and Encore's native support for DBs is limited.

- Cache support, this would be quite an improvement Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Encore is great in defining APIs and running and implementing Microservices without all the boilerplate.

I was able to get a small microservice running in a day, with Go as well with Typescript. As a developer not that deep into Microservices this is really a quickstart, based on a robust and easy to use framework.

Help from the community is also great and a big plus! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I used the included SQL database abstraction, which was a little bit difficult to understand. Encore abstracts from the actual DB and you have no direct access to the database - just with use of the encore CLI. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As an artist and creative coder working at the intersection of art and technology, I find Encore incredibly versatile. Its clean, functional interface and logical structure make backend development almost effortless. I especially appreciate how endpoints are generated and organized—this approach supports scalability without demanding premature complexity. While my artistic applications may never need to scale like a dating app, knowing the potential is there gives me confidence that I’m building projects with solid foundations, not just fragile prototypes. Additionally, the built-in cloud integration is seamless, and the documentation is refreshingly concise and to the point. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

To be honest, there’s little to criticize, but I’d say Encore may feel slightly opinionated in its architecture, which might deter developers who prefer more manual control or highly customized backend patterns. While this isn’t a deal-breaker for me, as someone who values elegance and convention, others might find the abstraction layers restrictive. Furthermore, broader third-party integrations or plugin ecosystems could enhance flexibility for unconventional workflows, particularly in niche artistic or cultural tech projects. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.