Python is the choice of many programmers and tech companies due to its simple syntax, extensive libraries, capacities for development and testing automation. It is suitable for developing all kinds of projects, from Financial & Banking solutions to Travel software development. It can take your project from zero to a hundred in terms of complexity, whether it’s a simple website with limited functionality, an API, or a complex solution incorporating machine-learning algorithms. And there are numerous Python frameworks for web development to facilitate this task.
The Django Stars team has been using Python for over 15 years in combination with various frameworks, primarily Django, developing software projects in fintech, travel and booking, e-commerce, and other industries. Our developers know the ins and outs of this field and are ready to discuss all you want to ask about Python and its frameworks.
Which one is the best Python web framework? As will be seen from the overview below, there’s no answer for all occasions. The choice depends on your goals.
All Python frameworks can be grouped into three broad categories: full-stack, micro, and asynchronous.
We will go through the best python libraries for web development and give our recommendations on which of the most popular Python frameworks are good to use, their advantages and disadvantages, features, examples of when they’re used, as well as handy comparison tables.
Let’s first tackle the full-stack web development frameworks in Python which, although they might be excessive for a small app, are suitable for a wider variety of projects.
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DjangoOfficial website | PyPi | GitHub | Stack Overflow
Django is a high-level python web development framework with a focus on making the development process more efficient and quick. More precisely, Django’s design philosophy saves you time and money, and a number of its principles – like DRY and rapid development – encourage developers to minimize code and reduce redundancies.
Area of application: Web development
Framework features:
Batteries included motto — saves you time
You don’t need to code basic functionality, since it comes pre-packaged and can be easily imported when you start a project. These packages were developed by professional developers, so you won’t need to spend time making sure they work correctly. Some of the packages include authentication, Google sitemap authentication, and session management.
Strong community and good documentation
From beginner to pro, Django unites a solid, helpful community that actively works on stabilizing and improving the framework, as well as helps each other out. Along with that, Django offers thorough documentation, so it’s easier to understand the various features.
Scalability
An essential feature of many projects is scalability. Especially if you’re a startup that doesn’t know how much it can or will grow, Django provides the functionality that enables you to create a small project and scale it as needed. You can handle more user requests and greater volumes of data if your web app goes through a growth spurt.
Admin panel
Project examples:
Official website | PyPi | GitHub | Stack Overflow
If you’re a fan of minimalism, the Pyramid framework is a good alternative. The framework suits any size of project and offers many features for creating complex applications or when you are scaling a small application.
Area of application: Web development
Features:
It’s flexible and easy to customize
Any component in this framework, like a templating engine or database, can be swapped out for another one. You can also use multiple components for the same app (such as two URL mapping methods) or connect to two completely different (by type) databases.
Easy use of Ajax requests
It’s simple to send Ajax requests where you want them, thanks to XHR views and decorators. It’s a rather straightforward process in terms of development.
Support of SQLAlchemy
If your project is SQL based, SQLAlchemy is a powerful database that allows you to create complicated queries and stay sane.
Project examples:
Official website | PyPi | GitHub | Stack Overflow
TurboGears is an open-source framework used for rapid development of data-driven web apps. It’s a great option if you want to develop an app that requires database connectivity, since TurboGears supports tools such as SQLAlchemy, Genshi, WebOb, and Repoze.
Area of application: Web development
Features:
Versatility
Though it’s a microframework, Turbogears is easy to scale up to a full-stack solution. You can easily put together a prototype and then scale it to a complex, fully fledged application.
Built-in extensibility with Pluggable Applications
You can create your own plug-in modules to replace or extend existing modules in the framework. All of them will remain fully under your control.
Project examples:
Official website | PyPi | GitHub | Stack Overflow
Web2Py is a scalable framework with a web-based Python IDE (integrated development environment). Web2Py has a ticketing system for issuing tickets to users whenever an error occurs.
Area of application: Web development
Features:
Flexible, powerful, and extendable
Web2py is a good option for complex applications, as well as for simple, beginner-friendly apps. It has enough features for efficient development, but can also be integrated with external libraries.
Maintainable over time
It is easy to pick up source code from another team and continue to maintain the app. Plus, if the code is rather old, it will still run on the latest versions of the framework.
Community support
Web2Py has a good community where you can find help with mastering the framework or solving more complex tasks. You can even get answers directly from the framework’s author, Massimo Di Pierro.
Project examples:
Official website | PyPi | GitHub | Stack Overflow
CubicWeb is a semantic web framework driven by the application data model. Instead of models or views, this framework uses cubes that can be joined together via a web server, database, and configuration files.
Area of application: Web development
Features:
Reusable cubes
Like Django and some other top Python frameworks, CubicWeb encourages developers to reuse components (which, in this case, are called cubes). Using cubes multiple times instead of writing code from scratch each time is a significant time-saver.
RQL queries
RQL, or relation query language, is designed to have a clear syntax for querying relations, giving you an easy way to manipulate data repositories and browse through relations or attributes.
Project examples:
Comparison table of Full-Stack Frameworks
If you have a small or mid-range project, here are our top microframework picks. So let’s check this Python frameworks list.
Official website | PyPi | GitHub | Stack Overflow
CherryPy is a minimalistic framework and a good choice for developing data access or templating technologies. It is fast, simple to use, and offers multiple out-of-the-box solutions to handle almost any type of project, from the least to the most demanding ones.
Area of application: Web development
Features:
Production-ready server
If you don’t want to use ‘gunicorn’, CherryPy has a production-ready WSGI server that can be used instead. You can also use them both simultaneously.
Dispatcher patterns
CherryPy provides more organization to the code and supports a wide range of functionality with dispatcher patterns.
Project examples:
Official website | PyPi, GitHub, Stack Overflow
Bottle is a microframework for creating APIs and simple applications. You can use it to develop prototypes or personal-use apps.
With Bottle, all the development happens in a single bottle.py file, which can be both an advantage and a fault. It can be a lot easier to work in one file or share it, but it can also get messy.
Area of application: Web development
Features:
The framework has virtually everything you might need to support small websites (including routing and templating), and it can be implemented with plugins.
Cons of Bottle:Project examples:
Official website | PyPi | GitHub | Stack Overflow
Falcon is a good choice for developing REST APIs. It allows you to build apps with a clean design, and doesn’t require you to load a lot of dependencies to build HTTP APIs.
Area of application: Web API development
Features:
Built for REST APIs
The framework is used to develop REST APIs and helps developers make certain design choices that would be impossible with a more general-purpose framework.
Lightweight, minimal dependencies
Falcon uses just the standard library, six, and mimeparse. This makes it extremely lightweight.
Project examples:
Dash | PyPi | GitHub | Stack Overflow
Dash is a good option for building analytical web apps, especially if your project is based on data science and you aren’t interested in the mechanics of web development. Dash applications run on Flask and use HTTP requests to communicate JSON packages, and the frontend component is rendered with React. Flask is also used to extend Dash’s functionality.
Area of application: Analytical web app development
Features:
Stateless backend
Dash allows you to create stateless web services, so it’s easy to scale the number of users an app can serve. This is made possible by creating more worker processes so requests can be sent to whichever one is available. A few workers can service a lot of sessions.
Dash components
Dash uses React.js to render components and includes a plugin system you can use to create your own Dash components with React.
Multi-user state
Dash enables multi-user access to apps made in this framework. This means that multiple users can have independent sessions.
Project examples:
Official website | PyPi | GitHub | Stack Overflow
Flask is a WSGI framework that can get you from a simple application to a complex platform. It’s one of the most popular Python web frameworks that gives developers the freedom to choose what libraries and tools to use. For that, Flask has many extensions developed by its community.
Area of application: Web development
Features:
Minimalistic and straightforward
With the help of Flask, it’s pretty easy to understand what processes run when you’re developeing an application with Python. Once you learn how to use it, it’s hard to lose the skill, even when updates and new implementations come along.
Easy to build a quick prototype
Flask has all the the tools you need to prototype a web application, right out of the box. It’s also easy to build an app with the components that come pre-packaged in the framework.
Project examples:
Official website | PyPi | GitHub | Stack Overflow
Hug is an API microframework for developing APIs on Python3, built with minimal resource consumption in mind. It is made for fast and easy development locally, via CLI of HTTP.
Area of application: Web API development
Features:
Simplifies API development
With Hug, you can create an API once and use it wherever you want. It also offers multiple interfaces, which makes developing APIs much simpler.
Automated documentation generator
Hug has functionality for automatically generating your API documentation with the docstrings and types annotations, saving the time you’d spend to write it yourself.
Project examples:
Official website | PyPi | GitHub
MorePath is a model-driven framework with a minimal setup footprint. Its main focus is on extensibility and reusable code. MorePath also allows for the creation of REST web services.
Area of application: Model-driven web development
Features:
Comprehensive documentation
MorePath has a detailed user guide with examples of implementation. There are also numerous articles and tutorials on how to handle different tasks in the framework.
App reuse
Like some other top Python frameworks, MorePath supports reusable code, so you don’t waste time coding the same functionality from scratch. You can also extend, isolate or override apps without much hustle.
Official website | PyPi | GitHub
Pycnic is a standalone framework that supports Python3. It is one of the best Python web frameworks. It is small and optimized for JSON-based APIs. Pycnic is fast and used to create web APIs only. It has a minimal footprint.
Area of application: Web development
Features:
Pycnic provides only the functionality you would need to JSON APIs.
Cons of Pycnic:Comparison table of microframeworks
Lastly, we have a much smaller Python framework list that could potentially a program’s performance manifold.
Official website | PyPi | GitHub
AIOHTTP is a Python 3.5+ framework that can be used both as a client and server web framework.
Area of application: Web development
Features:
Project examples:
Official website | PyPi | GitHub
Sanic is an open-source framework used to handle asynchronous requests for quick HTTP responses. It’s compatible with the await and async functions in Python 3.5, which improves speed and offers non-blocking capabilities.
Area of application: Web development
Features:
Project examples:
TornadoOfficial website | PyPi | GitHub
Tornado is an asynchronous framework and networking library that can scale multiple connections by using a non-blocking network I/O. It’s a great choice for applications where long-lived user connections are essential.
Area of application: Web development
Features:
Project examples:
Comparison table of Asynchronous Frameworks
Python has a lot of frameworks, but some are more flexible and versatile than others. Some are more suitable for smaller projects than bigger and more complex ones. Yet, all of them simplify and facilitate development to a certain extent. When used properly, each can be the best Python framework for web development.
In our python web frameworks review we tried to give you our honest thoughts about all these frameworks. Out of all the frameworks, we prefer Python & Django due to its time-saving capabilities, scalability, convenient functions, and wide range of features. Leveraging Django models methods enhances data handling, making it more efficient and intuitive for developers. The Django framework has proven its reliability on numerous projects, including financial and booking platforms, healthcare systems, and other software and web applications.
If you’re considering using Django & Python to implement your next idea, don’t hesitate to contact us for a consultation. And if you are not sure whether to contact us, read about why you should think about IT outstaffing in Ukraine.
Frequently Asked Questions
Most Python frameworks can be used for both web apps and websites, depending on the specific project requirements. However, some may be better suited for certain types of projects. In addition, all Python frameworks can be grouped into three broad categories:
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