Download websites that use Ktor

About Ktor

Our category column calls Ktor a Web frameworks, and the language column disagrees. The framework is written in and for a server side language, handles requests before any browser is involved, and touches the front end only when a developer explicitly asks it to render something. Taxonomies built for front end detection cope badly with server frameworks, and the honest reading is that the category here is a shelf label rather than a description of what the software does.

What the framework actually does is serve HTTP concurrently without tying up a thread per request, using the coroutine model JetBrains built into the language itself. Plugins supply authentication, serialisation, logging and routing, so a service starts small and grows by declaration rather than by inheriting a large application skeleton. Teams choose it when they already write in Kotlin and want endpoints without a heavyweight framework underneath them.

Detection of a framework like this is inferential and deserves to be labelled as such. As of October 2026 we associate 17 sites with the framework, drawn from response headers, default error pages, cookie naming and other artefacts that a deployment did not deliberately publish. A team that terminates traffic at a proxy and strips server headers vanishes from the count altogether, so the visible population skews towards smaller or less shielded deployments and away from heavily fronted production estates.

The consequence is that presence carries more information than the total does. A domain leaking a server framework signature from this ecosystem is very likely operated by an engineering team rather than by a marketing department, is unlikely to be a template site, and probably runs other tooling from the same language ecosystem alongside it. Recruiters, developer tool vendors and cloud sellers treat a signal like that as a qualification step, because it separates organisations that build software from organisations that buy it.

Published in 2018 and distributed under Apache 2.0, the framework costs nothing to adopt and leaves no licensing trail behind, so no vendor anywhere holds a customer list for it. A crawl derived export is the closest substitute, provided the undercount travels with the data instead of being quietly dropped.

A per-domain lookup tells a researcher whether one host exposes the signature today. The export answers the questions with money attached: how the population distributes across hosting providers, how it has changed between crawls, and which domains carry the framework alongside a specific database, analytics tool or payment provider.