Deno was created by Ryan Dahl — yes, the same person who created Node.js. He unveiled it at JSConf EU in 2018 with a talk titled “10 Things I Regret About Node.js,” and Deno was his answer to those regrets. The Deno Company was incorporated in 2021, based in New York City, and has raised over $25 million in funding.
Deno is a runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript that ships with built-in TypeScript support, a secure-by-default permissions model, a standard library, and a built-in formatter and linter. Unlike Node.js, it doesn’t use npm by default (though npm compatibility was added later) and instead pulls modules directly from URLs.
Deno Deploy is the company’s edge hosting platform, running on a globally distributed network. It’s designed for deploying JavaScript and TypeScript at the edge with minimal cold start times. Deno also created Fresh, a web framework for building server-rendered sites with Preact.
In 2023 and 2024, Deno made significant moves toward Node.js compatibility, adding npm support and the ability to run many Node programs without modification. Deno 2.0, released in late 2024, doubled down on this compatibility story. The runtime has an active community and is used by companies like Netlify (for their Edge Functions) and Slack (for their automation platform). It hasn’t overtaken Node, but it’s carved out a strong niche for developers who want a more modern runtime experience.
