Axios vs Fetch | Shawn's Blog

Recently there was a security breach on the Axios npm package where a malicious version was published, which got many people asking why to even use Axios in 2026, so let’s go over the main benefits of using Axios over Fetch and why you should still use it.

Base Instance

You can easily create an instance of Axios with default values like base URL or headers.

export const api = axios.create({
  baseURL: "https://api.example.com",
  headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${token}` },
});

const res = await api.get("/posts");

One setup, used everywhere. No repeating yourself on every call.

Timeout

Built-in timeout - fetch has no timeout option at all

// throws if no response within 3s
const res = await api.get("/posts", { timeout: 3000 });

With fetch you’d need AbortController + setTimeout boilerplate every time.

Throws on Error

Axios throws error on 4xx/5xx, fetch doesn’t.

// fetch: this won't throw on 404 or 500
const res = await fetch("/api/users");
console.log(res.ok); // false, but no error thrown

// axios: throws automatically on 4xx/5xx
const res = await api.get("/users");

Retry Logic

With Axios you can easily add retry logic with the axios-retry library.

import axiosRetry from "axios-retry";

// retries on idempotent reqs for network/5xx errors
axiosRetry(
  api, // axios instance
  {
    retries: 3,
    retryDelay: axiosRetry.exponentialDelay,
    retryCondition: (error) => error.response?.status >= 500,
  }
);

No custom logic, no wrappers. Just plug and play.

Interceptors

You can easily add interceptors for the request and the response, for example for authentication, logging, error handling and so on.

// Request: do something before sending request
api.interceptors.request.use((config) => {
  config.headers.Authorization = `Bearer ${getToken()}`;
  return config;
});

// Response: do something with the response
api.interceptors.response.use(
  // on success (2xx response)
  (res) => res,
  // on error (non-2xx response)
  (err) => {
    if (err.response?.status === 401) logout();
    return Promise.reject(err);
  }
);

One place to handle all the shared logic, not scattered across your app on every request.

Final Thoughts

Fetch is fine for a quick one-off request, a small hobby project or a minimal Cloudflare Worker. The moment your app grows, you’ll find yourself rebuilding half of axios from scratch. For frontend projects I recommend using Axios in combination with the TanStack Query library for data fetching and caching, the combination of the two is unmatched.