Introduction to Flask, Django & FastAPI
Flask, Django, or FastAPI? This is the question you should be asking yourself if you're interested in Python web development. In this video, I'm going to break down everything you need to know about these three different frameworks and tell you which one you should pick depending on your use case.
Now let's get started with Flask. This is a lightweight WSGI web application framework that's easy to get started with and highly customizable. It's a minimalist framework with extendable features, and it's great for building small to medium-sized apps like microservices.
Next, we move on to Django. Now, this is a high-level Python web framework that comes with a ton of features out of the box. It includes an ORM, forms, authentication, routing, and more. Django is ideal for handling complex web applications because of its conventional project structure and all of the features that are built into the framework, saving you a ton of time.
Lastly, we move on to FastAPI. Now this is a modern, high-performance web framework for building APIs with standard Python type hints. It has support for asynchronous programming, automatic data validation, and generation of OpenAPI documentation. This is great for quickly building APIs that are self-documenting and really fast in performance.
So now that we have an overview of these various frameworks, I'm going to start going through some very specific comparison criteria so you can understand exactly which one to pick depending on your use case.
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Comparison: Ease of Learning
So let's start comparing these frameworks, beginning with ease of learning. Now we start with Flask. This is by far the easiest to learn, and in just a few minutes, you can have a fully functioning API or website. It's very simple and easy to use. There's not a lot of setup or a ton of settings that you need to go through, and if you're just trying to build something very simple, I definitely recommend sticking with Flask.
Moving on from that, we go to FastAPI. Now, FastAPI is more of an intermediate difficulty. There are more concepts that you need to learn. You need to understand asynchronous programming, and it's helpful to also understand Pydantic and how you use the Python type hint system. FastAPI is a lot more powerful, and it can provide automatic documentation and data validation, which can be really, really helpful, but it does take a little bit longer to set up and can be slightly more complicated.
Lastly, we move on to Django. Now, this is by far the most complicated because it has so many features built in. That means just to get a simple Django website set up can actually take 20 or 30 minutes if you're learning this completely from scratch. It's definitely going to take you a few days or a few weeks to really understand all of the different features and how all of the components work together. That said, Django is definitely worth learning, and if you're going to be building something more complicated and with a lot of data, I definitely recommend going down that path. Just understand it will take you a little bit longer as there's a lot of things you need to learn to get started with Django.
So now we can get into performance, starting with Flask. Now Flask has good performance overall, but it's not the best for high-load applications. The reason for that is it's built in a synchronous context, meaning it's not going to handle multiple requests at the exact same time like some other web frameworks.
Next, we have FastAPI. Now, FastAPI out of all of the frameworks here is by far the fastest. It's superior to all of them, and the reason for that is it's built asynchronously, meaning it can scale and it can handle multiple requests at the exact same time.
Lastly, we move on to Django. Now, Django is the slowest of the three frameworks due to its comprehensive nature. However, it is still very reliable for large applications, and a lot of huge companies still use Django despite the fact that it's not the fastest out there. In summary, if you're really looking for the absolute best performance and you're building something like an API, then definitely choose FastAPI. But for most of you, this isn't going to matter a ton, so simply pick the one that's easiest to use or best suited for your project.
Comparison: Ideal Use Cases
So now we're going to dive into the use cases, starting with Flask. Now, Flask for me is what I use when I want to build something really quickly and I don't want to deal with a ton of configuration or spend a lot of time setting up a server. If I need a really fast web server, if I want to get something done in just a few minutes, I'll definitely turn to Flask. And even for slightly larger hobby projects, Flask is still totally fine. Personally for me, it's not something I would use in production unless it was doing a really simple task, and that's because there are better, more performant options out there. But a lot of times in my development environment, I'll need a simple API, and I'll turn to Flask because I know it's the fastest for me to get something set up with. It's great to start with if you're a complete beginner, it's good for prototyping, and you can really use it to learn the fundamentals of web development.
Next, we move on to Django. Now, Django is best when you're building a large monolithic application and you need a lot of built-in features like a CMS, authentication, and ORM, etc. Now, it's worth noting that with a framework like Flask, you can actually have extensions or additional Python packages that provide some of the same functionality, but it's not as conventional to use them and it can get a little bit messy when you're building a really large app. So that's personally why I prefer Django. Django has a lot of settings and configuration built in, a lot of things you already know how to do because it's simply built into the framework. When you start building something larger and you maybe have multiple developers on your team, it's a lot easier to work with something that has the conventions built in like Django and all of the features already wrapped into the framework. Django is really good when you're dealing with a lot of data. It has again something called an ORM, which is an object-relational mapping, and it allows you to utilize databases just like a normal Python object, which can make it really easy to do development and manage large amounts of data. That said, it also has all of that data that you can add to an admin panel, so you have a built-in CMS, and overall it's just better when you're dealing with a lot of data and you have these larger applications.
Now lastly, we move on to FastAPI. FastAPI is really the choice to go with if you're trying to build a high-performant API. Now with both Flask and Django, you can build APIs as well, or you can just build a normal website where you're rendering HTML and pages. But really, if you want the fastest API you can possibly have, then FastAPI is the one to go with. It has automatic data validation, automatic documentation which is super, super helpful, especially as you scale up, and it has asynchronous programming built in, which is really what provides it all of that speed. So overall, Flask for something simple, prototyping, getting a hobby project up and running; Django for something a little more professional where you need those built-in features; and then FastAPI when you want a high-performance, scalable API.
Community and Ecosystem
So now we move on to community and ecosystem. Now, all three of these are very large, well-known Python frameworks. They have a huge community behind them, and all of them have additional extensions, add-ons, plugins, etc. that you can add to have additional functionality in each framework. For example, something like Flask, even though it doesn't have a ton of features built in, there's all kinds of packages you can install that provide that additional functionality. For example, if you want authentication in Flask, you can simply install a package and now you have Flask authentication. You just need to do a little bit of configuration. Same thing for Django, same thing for FastAPI. So I wouldn't pick one of these three packages, or one of these three frameworks, simply because they have a larger community or ecosystem. All of them are very well-known, have all kinds of resources on the internet, and they're used for very large projects, some of which you've probably interacted with.
Job Demand
So now we're going to get into job demand and which of these you should learn if you are looking to land a developer role. Now bluntly, Django is going to be the most popular here and it's going to show up in the most job requirements. That's because this is the larger of the frameworks, it's used for a lot of larger or midsize companies, and this is really just what a lot of people go to when they're trying to build a website or some kind of backend service with Python. So if you are looking to land a role, simply learn Django. That's going to be your best bet. Not to say that Flask and FastAPI don't have some demand in the market, they do, and they're increasingly popping up, especially for the smaller companies or startups, but most of the time you're going to be seeing Django listed as that primary framework.
Overall, I would say it's worth it just to learn them all. Django will definitely take you the most amount of time, but picking up something like FastAPI or Flask is going to be pretty fast, and it can have an added benefit when you are applying to jobs.
Final Summary & Outro
So there you are, that's my breakdown of Flask, Django, and FastAPI. Flask for simple web apps where you're prototyping or building something quickly; Django for more complicated, data-driven applications; and FastAPI for building that fast, scalable API with Python. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you leave a like, subscribe to the channel, and I will see you in the next one.
