Choosing Between A Micro-Framework and A Full-Stack Framework – A Case Study on Flask and Django

There are a plethora of web development frameworks out there to help you get started quickly and scale-up fast once you hit production without needing to worry about all the underlying bells and whistles. Therefore, this is where you make one of the most crucial decisions regarding your project, do you choose a full-stack web framework to help you scale up quickly or a micro-framework to hit the ground running.

Today, we’ll be comparing Flask and Django, the most popular web-development frameworks in Python, to help make better choices in future projects.

What are Flask and Django?

Django follows an everything-included principle, wherein without replying to third-party libraries to accomplish tasks in your web application, everything is provided by Django from the beginning and is built into the heart of your application.

While this comes at a cost of flexibility and robustness, it does allow you to write maintainable projects with great scalability options as you will only be reliant on first-party Django apps. Therefore, with a Django application, you’re looking at user authentication, database schema design, ORM and migration with URL routing baked right into the core of your web application. Moreover, with the power of Web Server Gateway Interface bootstrapping tools, you can focus most of your development time on building the application and less on deploying it or managing it.

Flask, on the other hand, is far more lightweight and gets rid of a lot of these features in favor of letting the developer decide what goes into the application and what stays out, allowing them to expand particular features while keeping the web app simple.  

The key differences between the micro-framework Flask and the full-stack framework Django

Administration Interface

Django allows you to handle administration tasks regarding your project right from the start with a built-in, easy-to-use admin interface. Although this should not be your long-term solution and you should cater to your business needs and design a better admin interface, when starting a project, having this extra leeway can get you started faster. Flask, on the other hand, does not have a built-in administration interface and you will have to create one from scratch or use third-party tools.

Bootstrapping and Project Layout

Flask projects are single-app projects wherein the developer is dealing with a single project to maintain and run. On the other hand, Django can host several applications under a single project. With this, you can add features to your web application in the form of smaller bite-sized apps and maintain each app individually throughout the lifecycle of the project. Not only does this boost maintainability, but it also allows you to scale with business requirements and develop new features quickly.

Bottom Line

Both Django and Flask are currently being used in sites that generate a decent amount of traffic. From these statistics, it’s seen that Django remains a popular choice among developers due to the full-stack capabilities and the convenience of having everything neatly packed into a single package. However, Flask is great for serving sites with static content and smaller-scale projects which are not heavily reliant on ORM models or bootstrapping. Hence, choose a micro-framework or full-stack framework based on your business and scalability needs.