All About Python Backends FastAPI vs Django vs Flask… ??? (2022)

Raheel Siddiqui
4 min readOct 8, 2022

This article compares the Python frameworks used by Intel, IBM, NASA, Pixar, Netflix, Facebook, JP Morgan Chase, Spotify, Nebula and other companies, despite criticism that it is a slow language.

Python Slow Speed?

Although Python might not be as fast as some other languages, development doesn’t just concentrate on just one aspect. Python is among the easiest programming languages to learn. Its modest pace is compensated for by its rapid deployment, scalability, simplicity of maintenance, and readability. However, Python frameworks are now becoming quicker as a result of its async features, and Python 3.11 will see the fruits of CPython’s multi-year effort to make Python a faster programming language.

Python Frameworks

Although there are several Python frameworks available for backend development, Flask, Django, and FastAPI are the most well-known.

Flask vs Django vs FastAPI

Flask

Flask is a lightweight WSGI web application framework. With the capacity to scale up to complicated applications, it is made to be quick and simple to get started with. One of the most used Python web application frameworks, it started off as a straightforward wrapper over Werkzeug and Jinja.

Scalability, Easy to Use, Support for Testing, AI models.

Most people in today’s fast-paced industry start with a simple web app concept and then scale it to fit the needs. Now, if you work for a startup or small firm, you want to create your web application using a framework that is extremely scalable. One such framework that meets your needs is flask. It can handle a large number of requests as your company grows. As an illustration, Pinterest switched from Django to Flask and now handles billions of queries daily. Flask’s ability to modularize the codebase as it expands over a predetermined period is what makes it scalable.

The application created with Flask is more scalable than the monolithic application. Flask gained popularity when programmers began to use it to deploy AI models and use them as APIs.

Django

Django’s main objective is to make it simple to create sophisticated database-driven websites. Some of the largest websites, like Instagram, Mozilla, Nextdoor, and clubhouse, use it. Less code, low coupling, reusability, and pluggability of components throughout development are the factors that make anything renowned. These characteristics also aid in the quick development.

Django is mostly preferred for big codebases because of having really good code structure and maintainability. Django is popular for “batteries included”, or the ability to discover practically everything needed to create a complete application, is what makes Django so well-known. These batteries contain forms, view layers, model layers, ORM, authentication, HTML templating, session management support, URL routing, middlewares, HTTP libraries, multi-site support, i18n, template engine, and python compatibility, among others.

Other than that Django gives Security, Built-in Admin UI, DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself), Scalability and Reliability, Good Documentation and The DRF(Django Rest Framework) is just amazing.

FastAPI

FastAPI is built on the Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface (ASGI) web server Uvicorn, but you can also mount Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) applications using relevant middleware.

It’s currently used by Uber, Microsoft, Explosion AI and others.

High performance, easy concurrency support, and a user-friendly dependency injection framework are all features of FastAPI. Another advantage to consider is built-in data validation.

FastAPI might not have a basic code structure like Django but that could be the positive aspect of it as well. It can be structured as you want my favourite preferences are.

  • Alembic (For Database Migrations).
  • SQLAlchemy (For ORM).
  • Pydantic (For Typing or Serialization).
  • Pytests (For TDD or Unit Testing).
  • Poetry (For Package management).
  • Docker (For Vitualization).

You may put up a Django-like code structure and take advantage of FastAPI benefits with all of these packages.

FastAPI provides Excellent performance(One the fastest python framework), Native concurrency support, Dependency injection support, Inbuilt documentation support,Inbuilt data validation.

Conclusion

We learned about the three most well-known web frameworks based on Python through this article. Each of them has a strong suit, such as the FastAPI for applications that require high performance, or Flask, which is the most adaptable of all these frameworks, for applications that require flexibility. Because of its robust behaviour, we may use Django as a full-stack development framework because it offers a variety of facilities that can be very useful in constructing a lot of features in one application.

Feel free to share your thoughts about python backends. You can reach out to me at Linkedin, twitter.

connect me at raheelsiddiqui.com

--

--

Raheel Siddiqui

Full Stack Engineer | AWS UG Leader | GitHub Campus Expert | Former Google DSC Lead | AWS Community Builder | Opensource FTW✨