What are the best backend web frameworks?

Django was first released in 2006, it has had a lot of time to mature and become better with each release. It also has by far the largest community out of all python frameworks who have continuously over the years built and maintained many powerful plugins. See More

score 246 · Answer 2

Django

Top Pro

Mature software with many plugins developed over the years

Top Con

Synchronous

Everything in Django is synchronous, so writing reactive stuff, or long living responses can be tricky. However, Django 3.0 fixes this issue by allowing for async. See More

Jorge Alberto Díaz Orozco's Experience

I've used Django in several projects always succeeding in deliver on time and with great quality and test coverage. It is very TDD friendly and extendable. See More

Specs

Default Template Engine:Django

Default ORM:Django ORM

Multi Language Support:Excellent

Django supports Object-Relational Mapping. With models defined as Python classes which are actually subclasses of Django's django.db.models.Model. Each attribute of the model is then represented as a database field. Queries are lazily executed and Django gives developers an automatically-generated database-access API. See More

Top Pro

ORM support

Top Con

Poor server performance

Python can't serve as many requests on the same hardware as a compiled language such as Java, C/C++, Erlang or Golang. See More

TruthfulIshara's Experience

used yii, laravel, cake previously experiemented with rails and .net, by far python is fun to write and django gives my granular control while not blowing my head with unnecessary stuff. See More

Top Pro

Highly customizable

Django is in itself a highly customizable web framework. The database, template framework and ORM can all be swapped out. See More

Top Con

Gets in your way

Django makes you write very specific code, you're implementing framework's functions instead of writing vanilla python powered by the framework. See More

AgreeableOdin's Experience

simple, robust, extensible and highly customizable and moreover it's on python See More

Top Pro

Python is a very easy to learn and a very readable language

Python is one of the easiest languages to learn for beginners, especially the syntax, and the Python syntax itself is very readable and seems a lot like written English. See More

Top Con

Template errors fail silently by default

If you make a typo in a template variable, or change a view so that variable is no longer passed to the template, you won't get an error message pointing out that something has gone wrong. That reference will just be treated as if it is an empty string instead. There is a way to configure this, but since so many templates have been written assuming this behavior, nobody ever enables template errors because it would break so much of the existing support tools (e.g. the built-in admin interface). See More

DashingMarowit's Experience

Django is a fully matured framework that allows you to focus on being creative and implement new features that make your app unique instead of 'reinventing the wheel'! See More

Top Pro

Clear and defined MVC organization

Django follows some pretty well established MVC patterns. With everything in place and where requests follow a clear path through urlresolvers, middleware, view and context processors. See More

Top Con

Changes too fast

Django changes too fast. This means old sites constantly need to be fixed and that new books on Django become out of date after only 2 years. See More

DiligentCoeus's Experience

Easy development of custom features because almost everything is included and it only needs few adjustments See More

Top Pro

Mature and proven software

Over time, Django became not just an implementation of an idea of a framework, but a way to organize your code and a web application's work flow. It provides a good default implementation for everything: sessions, persistence, rest api and other things. When you outgrow the default mechanism, you can replace it with your own. See More

Top Con

The documentation does not cover real-world scenarios

It is a larger documentation indeed, however is not deep and covers non real problems or even don't show any examples. You'll be better with Google or Stackoverflow. See More

Sam Paccoud's Experience

With 10 years experience on Django it gives me incredible productivity and at the same time stability of my investments over the years. See More

Top Pro

Admin area out of the box

Django comes with a highly customizable out of the box admin panel and authentication. This makes the development and production of a simple CMS extremely easy. See More

Top Con

Not suited for small applications

Django's sheer scale and functionality can feel clunky and bloated for small applications. See More

CromulentPyroeis's Experience

Django is super good and fast and easy to understand See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn the basics

It's very easy to learn the basics and be productive right away then layer on more advanced concepts later. See More

Top Con

There is no "magic"

If syntactic sugar is a bad thing, then those people that think so should program in some form of machine language. See More

EnergeticMegaera's Experience

Awesome Framework. Absolutely loved Django's ORM See More

Top Pro

Developing a simple prototype can be very fast

Django's philosophy of batteries included means that experienced developers won't have to plan too much ahead on what kind of application infrastructure they need and instead just start developing web applications quickly. See More

Top Con

Routing requires some knowledge of regular expressions

Given a GET request for /topics/426/viewpoints/1/sections/create, how does Django decide which bit of Python code is invoked to handle it? It compares the request path to your giant pile of regular expressions. And then if there's some other regular expression starts matching /top and all your requests for /topics/ start going there, good luck figuring out why. You won't be informed of any conflict until you notice you seem to be getting the wrong pages back. The structure of URL paths is almost universally hierarchical. There is no call to have anything as ridiculously flexible (and notoriously hard-to-read) as regular expressions to organize request routing. But starting from Django 2, you do not need to use regex with paths. See More

RespectfulSiliniez's Experience

Great, productive framework, but has a lof of quirks and forces me to live in documentation (which could be better). See More

Top Pro

Simple database management

Just a few lines of code can instruct Django to create all the tables and fields required in your database automatically. Schemas are managed with "migrations", that are also created automatically, and can be rolled out from your development box and implemented on production systems with just a single command. This performs any database changes required, from table creation, indexes, renaming fields, and pre-populating initial data. Each migration builds on the previous migrations, so you can trace the evolution of your data and even recreate the layout of your database at any point in the lifecycle of your application. See More

Top Pro

There is no "magic"

The code is explicit. Contrary to Rails / Symfony 1 and other frameworks; you don't need any knowledge to "reverse engineer" some code. See More

Top Pro

Stability over the years with no technical debt

Applications written a few years still make sense and can be easily upgraded. See More

Top Pro

The most popular Python web framework

The most popular web framework for Python, where Python is probably the most popular programming language. See More

Express' extremely powerful routing API allows developers to do tasks ranging from building a REST API to building the routes for a simple web app and then take it to the next level by using route parameters and query strings. See More

score 108 · Answer 3

Express.js

Top Pro

Great routing API

Top Con

No single recommended way of doing something

Express considers itself to be a "minimalistic unopinionated framework", it basically lets the developer determine how their project will be organized. On one hand, this gives anyone terrific power and flexibility to use any library they want for a certain task and to organize their project structure however they want. But on the other hand, there's no single recommended way of organizing things, which can be a trap for beginners and experienced developers alike and result in unmaintainable projects. See More

Paulo Henrique's Experience

Simple, easy and fast! See More

Specs

Written in:JavaScript

Platforms:Cross-platform

License:MIT

Repository:https://github.com/expressjs/express

Express.js is really well documented. Everything is covered and they are very helpful for beginners and advanced developers alike. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation

Top Con

Need tons of additional libraries to make a full site

If you want to make much more than a simple API then you need to add, learn, and integrate a whole bunch of other libraries. See More

Top Pro

Relatively mature

Being a somewhat old Node.js web app framework and being one of the most widely used frameworks, Express.js has matured quite a lot during all that time. It's more stable than its competitors and a huge community backing it. See More

Top Con

Working with relational databases can be a hassle

Not only express, but every Node framework has this problem. While there exist plugins and libraries that allow developers to use relational databases in their web applications, they are not very good and usually it's a hassle and more trouble than it's worth to use a relational database with Node and express. See More

Top Pro

Can make use of a great number of plugins

Express takes advantage of Node's NPM to distribute and install countless plugins made by third parties which solve almost anything a developer would want to do with Express. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn for people who have a little experience in webdev

The fact that it's a JavaScript framework means that it's easy to learn for people who have even a minimal background in web development since they would also have experience in JavaScript too. See More

Top Pro

Simple, powerful, and quick

Node in general has loads of libraries that would do virtually everything any web app would do. Though an argument could be made that it lacks the powerful debugging tools other frameworks have like, say, .Net C#. See More

Top Pro

Minimalistic and unopinionated

Express integrates well with other tools and doesn't stop you from doing things which it's not "built for". See More

Top Pro

Setting up is very easy

Setting up a new Express project is very easy. It consists of installing a handful of libraries through NPM run a single npm install and everything is ready to go. See More

Top Pro

Easy way of adding middleware

It is extremely simple to add any amount of custom middleware. See More

Top Pro

Great supportive community

Express has a big community with a lot of guide and tutorials written about it by developers that have been using it for quite some time. See More

Top Pro

It's popular

Top Pro

Great for beginner Node.js programmers

With a little learning curve, it is a good choice for new NodeJS developers to get started quickly. Express boasts great, thorough documentation. See More

Top Pro

Massive ecosystem of middleware

If you have not already checked out the Express.js ecosystem of middleware, you should. See More

Top Pro

Has the largest userbase

It's by far the most popular framework for node. See More

Top Pro

Great support for Sequelize ORM

Sequelize ORM is a great Javascript ORM for relational databases and Express fully supports it. This means that Express itself has great support for relational databases. See More

Top Pro

Has detailed information

Very simple and fast. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

Top Pro

Good Oauth/Facebook integration with connect module

You can easily add oAuth integration/social logins to your next web app without much hassle, using this authentication middleware for connect. See More

Top Pro

Express.js is in the Node.js Foundation Incubator Program

Node.js Foundation Announcement here The Node.js Foundation is a Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. See More

Top Pro

Support for a lot of plugins

Express takes advantage of Node's NPM to distribute and install countless plugins made by third parties which solve almost anything a developer would want to do with Express. See More

It validates the data using the types you declared. Even in deeply nested JSON requests. See More

score 24 · Answer 4

FastAPI

Top Pro

Data validation

ReveredPsyche's Experience

standard framework based on python , can handle all small and big projects easily clear syntax , feature rich , fast (support Async), Dependency Injection, optional type declaration , automated docs with OpenAPI , json validation , websocket and background task support ,and one of the fastest growing communities See More

Specs

Default ORM:SqlAlchemy

Platforms:Cross-platform

License:MIT

It's based on Async IO, which gives it high concurrency. But you can use non-async libraries and it runs them appropriately. See More

Top Pro

Async IO / optional

SincereRindr's Experience

I never wanted to make a web application, just an API. FastAPI provides me with just that, using modern concepts. See More

Top Pro

Standards

It is based on standards: OpenAPI, JSON Schema and OAuth 2.0. See More

Top Pro

High-performance

It's based on Starlette and Pydantic, so, it's one of the fastest Python frameworks. See More

Top Pro

World class documentation

It has some of the best documentation of any framework. See More

Top Pro

Database independent

It's independent of database or ORM, but compatible with all of them. Including relational databases and NoSQL. See More

Top Pro

One of the fastest growing communities

Top Pro

Fast is really fast

It's easy to develop API based applications in Python on deadlines for Android and IOS Development. See More

Top Pro

Automatic docs

It generates interactive API documentation automatically from your code. See More

Top Pro

Editor completion

It is based on Python type declarations, so, editors and tools can give great support. Including type checks and autocompletion everywhere. See More

Top Pro

Background tasks

Included support for background tasks, thanks to being based on Starlette. See More

Top Pro

OAuth 2.0

It has integrated support for OAuth 2.0. Including declaring required scopes per endpoint. So, you can easily integrate it with external OAuth 2.0 providers or build your own with it. See More

Top Pro

Supports GraphQL out of the box

Python's graphene library is included as an optional dependency meaning that GraphQL API's are supported out of the box, with no additional tweaking needed. See More

Top Pro

Dependency injection

It has a simple but powerful dependency injection system, it can be used to handle authentication, per-user rate limiting, authorization controls (e.g. with roles), etc. See More

Top Pro

WebSockets

Because it's an async framework, it can handle async-native protocols like WebSockets. See More

The sheer scale and massive number of developers using Rails has produced a large number of guides, tutorials, plugins, documentation, videos and anything that can help new and old Rails developers. See More

score 112 · Answer 5

Ruby on Rails

Top Pro

Massive community with lots of tutorials and guides

Top Con

Learning curve seems low at first, but starts becoming steeper

Rails' simplicity is deceptive. It's learning curve is really low at first, and the huge number of tutorials and guides out there for starting with Rails make it even easier. But it starts getting harder and harder as apps become more complicated. If good code conventions and OO design are not followed, then the codebase will be all over the place and it becomes impossible to maintain it. See More

Juan Viamonte's Experience

Rails is amazing, fast and easy to learn. I recommend Rails over any other web-framework. See More

Specs

Written in:Ruby

Default ORM:ActiveRecord

Default Template Engine:ERB

Default Test Engine:RSpec & Cucumber

Top Pro

Many plugins (gems) available

There are many third-party plugins (Ruby gems) available for Rails development. The larger ones and those that have a lot of downloads and users are very well documented and easy to use. See More

Top Con

Too much magic

So much behavior is implemented with dynamic behind-the-scenes changes to existing classes that obscure bugs are way too common. Conflicting interactions between multiple plugins that both try to change the same objects are a particularly pernicious example. See More

SplendidWaygl's Experience

many years building for the web See More

Top Pro

Ruby is a nice readable language

Ruby has a very clean syntax that makes code easier to both read and write than more traditional Object Oriented languages, such as Java. For beginning programmers, this means the focus is on the meaning of the program, where it should be, rather than trying to figure out the meaning of obscure characters. presidents = ["Ford", "Carter", "Reagan", "Bush1", "Clinton", "Bush2"] for ss in 0...presidents.length print ss, ": ", presidents[presidents.length - ss - 1], "\n"; end See More

Top Con

Too much convention

OptimisticBellona's Experience

8-year Rails See More

Top Pro

Good conventions

MVC is a great starting point, and perfect for APIs. You'll rarely if ever have to wonder "where should I put this code?" See More

Top Con

Not a very popular language outside of web development

Top Pro

Small projects are very easy and it's possible to finish one in very little time

The large number of documentation, tutorials, videos and guides which help new developers who are just starting with Rails make it seem very easy to create a small and simple application by relying on code generation and components that come out of the box with Rails. See More

Top Con

Bad performance

Among the slowest frameworks. If you want to scale, you will have to migrate to another land. See More

Top Pro

Cool language

Top Pro

Supported on every major cloud or VPS hosting service

Rails is supported on every major Cloud hosting service nowadays. There are also countless tutorials that help developers deploy their Rails apps if there are any problems on the way. See More

Top Pro

Meta-programming capabilities

Thanks to breakthroughs in ROSLYN compiler and the efforts of the .NET COre developer team, code written in C# can reach speeds just a step behind C++. See More

score 64 · Answer 6

ASP.NET Core

Top Pro

Fast and getting faster

Top Con

Microsoft environment

InquisitiveNergal's Experience

2 years See More

Specs

Written in:C#

Default ORM:Entity Framework

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Docker

WEB SERVER:Kestrel

Can run on Windows, Linux and Mac (also Visual Studio Code editor). See More

Top Pro

Multi platform

RickZeeland's Experience

With ASP.NET Core you can build web apps, web services, IoT apps, and mobile backends. It can be used with Visual Studio, or with Visual Studio Code. See More

Top Pro

JSON optimization

In .NET Core 2.1 and 3.0, new APIs are added that make it possible to write JSON APIs that require less memory, using Span<T> and UTF8 strings, and improve throughput of applications like Kestrel, ASP.NET Core web server. See also Utf8JsonReader. See More

Lukáš Josai's Experience

Very good, simple to use and great for learning as it encourages good programming habbits. See More

Top Pro

Tutorials and documentation quality

Both microsoft and 3rd party tutorials are mostly of high quality and encourage you to use the industry best-practices. See More

ResponsibleDekla's Experience

Not so easy to get into, when you learn it, it goes a long way fast. See More

Top Pro

Built-in middleware

Built-in middleware featuring: Authentication, Cookie policy, Health Check, MVC, Session etc. See More

Top Pro

Hosting

Ability to host on IIS, Nginx, Apache, Docker, or self-host in your own process. See More

Top Pro

Ease of Use

Top Pro

Security

It is a very secure platform. See More

Top Pro

Tooling

Both VS and VSCode are powerful free IDEs that are well integrated with ASP.net Core. VS Community also allows for commercial use for projects with less than 5 developers. See More

Flask gives developers a lot of flexibility in how they develop their web applications. For example, the choice of not having an ORM, but instead choosing one suited to the task, or another area where Flask gives a lot of options to developers is the templating. They can use Jinja2, Flask's default templating language or choose from a number of different templating languages they desire. See More

score 68 · Answer 7

Flask

Top Pro

Very flexible

Top Con

Does not come with things out of the box already setup like Django does

Ray's Experience

I've worked on several Flask projects ranging from small-scale CRUD apps to medium-sized REST APIs powered by Flask. It has been a pleasant experience thus far and there aren't many drawbacks that I consider to be a deal breaker, except the lack of async support (but this is understandable because Flask isn't designed for it, neither is WSGI). See More

Specs

Flask is very easy to get up and going, with vanilla HTML or with bootstrap pieces. It doesn't take much lines of Python to load Flask to get headers working, etc, and since it's all modular you don't have to have something you don't want in your application. See More

License:BSD License

Top Pro

Minimalist without losing power

Top Con

Setting up a large project requires some previous knowledge of the framework

Setting up a large project with Flask is not that easy considering how there's no "official" way of doing it. Blueprints are a useful tool in this regard but require some additional reading and are a bit tricky to get right for a beginner. The lack of some defaults can also be problematic. Having to choose between different libraries for a certain task is never easy, especially if you have never worked with Flask before. See More

ReliableEuthenia's Experience

fast to construct prototype See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

The official documentation is very thorough and complete. Everything is explained in-depth and followed by extremely well-explained tutorials that tackle real-world problems. See More

Top Con

Not async-friendly

Flask is explicitly not designed to handle async programming. use FastApi instead See More

Top Pro

Able to use ORM or "true SQL"

Top Con

Does not handle concurrent requests as well as other options

Top Pro

Extremely easy to build a quick prototype

Even though it's pretty minimalistic out of the box, Flask still provides the necessary tools to build a quick prototype for a web app right after a fresh install. With all the main components pretty much packed in the flask package, building a simple web app in a single Python file is as easy as it gets. See More

Top Con

Threadlocals and globals used everywhere

The default way of creating applications in flask makes it hard to use reusable and clean code. See More

Top Pro

Lots of resources available online

Flask is one of the most popular Python web frameworks, if not the most popular one. As such, there's plenty of guides, tutorials, and libraries available for it. A large number of important Python libraries, such as SQLAlchemy have libraries for Flask, which add valuable bindings to make the development process and the integration between these libraries and Flask as easy as possible. See More

Top Con

HTML-oriented, not API-oriented

Not necessarily designed for making APIs, though that is possible See More

Top Pro

More lightweight than Django

Laravel comes out of the box with it's own CLI called Artisan. With Artisan developers can do several different tasks such as migrating databases, seeding databases, clearing the cache and much much more. See More

score 182 · Answer 8

Laravel

Top Pro

Comes with it's own CLI

Top Con

Does not follow Semantic Versioning

Major.minor.patch is how it is supposed to go and any minor or patch versions should not change the API in such a manner that the code will cause errors. However, even Laravel's patch versions can change the API (and this may be in part due to its reliance upon Symfony - sometimes it's unavoidable). Laravel is on a quick release cycle as well, so there are many updates (which is also good of course) and many chances for this to affect users of the framework. (Not true any more since Laravel 6.0, September 3rd, 2019) See More

jawatson's Experience

10+ years as a full stack web developer See More

Specs

Written in:PHP

Default ORM: Query Builder

License:MIT License

Default Template Engine:Blade

Laravel's documentation is thorough and very good. It covers everything and is very helpful to experienced users and new users alike. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation

Top Con

Generates bloated projects

While the speed doesn't seem to be an issue with it (on local tests), in production it may be hindered. The framework creates a ton of files and folders, some of which your app might not even use. Not good if you don't like having a ton of folders and rigid non-standard PHP folder structure for development. See More

MeticulousResheph's Experience

Easy to learn See More

Top Pro

Allows for configuration and extending

Laravel allows for free configuration and does not force developers to use a single project structure, instead they can change it to how they wish. It also uses Composer as a dependency manager which allows developers to extend their Laravel application with additional libraries. See More

Top Con

Uses too much magic methods

It complicates debugging and autocompletion. See More

LogicalHapi's Experience

Its a full stack framework that comes with server side rendering (optional). learning curve is easy. structure is very clean. can generate files from cli. good debuger. tinker for tinkering with db and other functionality. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Top Con

Dependency on Symfony Framework

Laravel doesn't completely stand on its own (maybe this will change in the future). A lot of it depends on another framework. This is problematic because when Symfony's API changes it can affect Laravel in adverse ways. See More

Top Pro

Friendly community

Community "leaders" are approachable, helpful and respectful. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

While a lot of times you can write things in plain PHP, it will hinder you down the line when you want to use core features and find that you have to rewrite code which then causes issues throughout the app. Documentation is good, but you need to know what you are looking for and practical examples are non-existent. Many features have been updated throughout the versions in such a short time that tutorials you find online are confusing to sort through outdated tutorials and guides that no longer work or have been depreciated. See More

Top Pro

It includes its own ORM

Laravel's Eloquent ORM is a simple and fast Object-Relational Mapping which helps with organizing the application's database. It supports the most popular databases (MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, etc.) out of the box. See More

Top Con

Hard to use model properties

You need to check all model properties in database to know it exists, or declare all them manually. See More

Top Pro

Robust ecosystem

Excellent paid services for provisioning (Forge), deployment (Envoyer)and learning (Laracasts.com, Laravel Up and Running). Many high-quality free supported and community packages, blogs, videos and other resources. See More

Top Con

Follows bad design practices

Uses bad practices, like Singletons, Magic models, Middleware. See More

Top Pro

Extremely powerful template system

Laravel has a powerful template system called Blade. It's quite similar to Twig or Moustache with lots of curly braces but the real power comes from the usage of PHP code directly in the view. Blade templates compile directly to raw PHP and are processed in the server when a request is made. See More

Top Con

Bloated

While the speed doesn't seem to be an issue with it (on local tests), in production it may be hindered. The framework creates a ton of files and folders, some of which your app might not even use. Not good if you don't like having a ton of folders and rigid non-standard PHP folder structure for development. See More

Top Pro

Easy to write web apps with authentication

Laravel comes with Authentication capabilities and a fully-powered Auth class out of the box. For passwords it uses bcrypt. See More

Top Con

Slow Bootstrap

Due to it using Composer, it has a slow bootstrap on each page request. Even after things are cached. It carries with it a lot of overhead. See More

Top Pro

Good for building RESTful APIs

With migrations, powerful and intuitive Eloquent CRUD, resource routing, and simple JSON response out of the box, a complete REST API can be written in hours. See More

Top Pro

Gives developers a great degree of freedom in how they set up their project structure

Laravel allows for free configuration and does not force developers to use a single project structure, instead they can change it to how they wish. See More

Top Pro

Gulp tasks in the form of Laravel Elixir

In Laravel 5.0 they added Laravel Elixir, which provides an API for using Gulp tasks for Laravel applications. Elixir supports several CSS preprocessors and even some test tools. But it's still in the early stages of development and it will be developed even further in the following releases. With more methods and more Gulp tasks supported. See More

Top Pro

Great Ecosystem

Has a great Ecosystem with SAAS like: Forge, Envoyer, Nova & from 3rd parties like oh-dear See More

Top Pro

Can use Symfony components

Laravel uses many libraries built for the Symfony PHP framework. Many of these libraries are well-built and have been tested by users before. Since the point of using a web framework is to shorten development time and to avoid reinventing the wheel for problems that have already been solved, then it's logical for a framework to use libraries already built to solve problems that have already been solved. See More

Top Pro

Handles event queuing

Laravel supports event queuing and it does so in a very simple way. To create an event that should be queued just run: php artisan handler:event SendPurchaseConfirmation --event=PodcastWasPurchased --queued This creates a handler that implements the Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldBeQueued interface. Now when this handler is called it will automatically be queued by the event dispatcher. See More

Top Pro

Great Community

Top Pro

Lots of great resources for learning

There are lots of sources for learning about Laravel and modern PHP. The Laracasts.com website is one of the most useful resources for people who'd like to get into a framework. See More

Multithreading, it scales well, good documentation, huge community, a lot of best practices. See More

score 24 · Answer 9

Spring-boot

Top Pro

Runs on Java so you get all that good stuff

Top Con

Too much information

Spring is a huge framework with a huge ecosystem, so there's a million resources to read and decide how to use, which can be overwhelming in the beginning. See More

Specs

Written in:Java

Platforms:Cross-platform

Repository:https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot

Top Pro

Use plain old Java objects

Create your Java objects, then annotate the methods. Run application and the framework creates a web service from your Java object. See More

Top Con

Lacking in UI development

While actually very good and with a very complete and rich feature set to develop and maintain code on the server side, it still doesn't provide any rich framework for building good user interfaces. See More

Top Pro

Preconfigured starters

Top Pro

Inherits all of Spring's strengths

Boot is just a thin configuration layer over Spring Framework, as such it inherits all the strengths of Spring. See More

Top Pro

Fast prototyping

Spring boot is built for fast prototyping. See More

You need to be a C programmer to debug Zephir or C code. Or if Phalcon is not maintained anymore and you have a problem and don't have much skills in C, you will be hard-pressed to find a C programmer to fix it. See More

score 21 · Answer 10

Phalcon

Top Pro

Very Fast

Top Con

Debugging requires knowledge of C

Specs

Written in:PHP

Top Pro

Very flexible project structure

You can set up the base project as you want. It's very flexible See More

Top Con

Not for shared hosting

Phalcon needs root access to install php extension which is written in C language. Developers who plan on using Phalcon must use VPS or Cloud Hosting with root access available. See More

Top Pro

Loosely coupled components

Some components can be used as standalone packages like models, views, etc.. See More

Top Pro

Clean and light project code

Since the framework code is not in the project directory, the code is light and clean. See More

It is based and is dependent on the Spring Framework, therefore it benefits from tools like for example Roo and Spring Tool Suite and many more tools included in the Spring Framework. All Maven dependencies are available in a public Maven repository. There are also 3rd-party solutions for Spring, such as MyEclipse which includes scaffolding capability for Spring MVC. See More

score 44 · Answer 11

Spring MVC

Top Pro

Spring has an extensive ecosystem

Top Con

Complex and not newbie friendly

Spring MVC architecture, although simple, has a lot of layers and abstractions which can be hard to debug if problems arise. It is also highly dependent on the Spring core. It's an old and mature framework that has numerous amount of ways to extend and configure it – and this actually makes it fairly complex. See More

Top Pro

Spring MVC has a massive community

Being the oldest and most used JVM web framework, means that Spring MVC has a massive community of followers who are very helpful and have provided numerous tutorials and answers on SO. Spring even holds an annual conference called SpringOne. The Spring forums and SO are great places to ask and get help about anything Spring related. The website blog and newsletter keep developers informed on every news related with the framework. See More

Top Con

Bloated legacy DI API

Spring DI is bloated and rather complex in comparison to CDI. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation that covers almost everything

The official documentation covers virtually everything. The official website also has a series of great tutorials in video and text formats. There are links to Github repositories for Spring sample applications and there are also a lot of third-party tutorials out there for the fact that Spring MVC is so widely used by many experienced developers. See More

Top Con

Unnecessarily slow, bloated, complex, convoluted, wordy, and verbose

Spring is convoluted and XML-ridden. Deploying things on the JVM has always been a pain in the nipple and nothing has changed much since the 90s. All things Java-related are wordy, verbose, and a waste of developer time. See More

Top Pro

It uses Java, a strongly typed language

Top Con

Slow Prototyping

If you are looking to build a quick prototype fast and easy, Spring isn't going to help much. It's very large and quite hard to grasp if you are just beginning with it. See More

Top Pro

Spring apps are highly scalable

Applications are meant to scale as the framework is used in large-scale applications worldwide. Components like EhCache are used to scale memory cache and it also contains components used for parallel processing. Batch enables processing of large volumes of records and job processing statistics. See More

Top Con

Lacking in UI development

While actually very good and with a very complete and rich feature set to develop and maintain code on the server side, it still doesn't provide any rich framework for building good user interfaces. See More

Top Pro

Spring core team keeps it fresh and updated

Top Con

Updating and code maintenance can be a grueling task if you are a beginner

Updating your project is manageable if you’re already familiar with the framework and the project itself, but if you’re just diving in it can be a little overwhelming and hard. See More

Top Pro

Not just a web framework

Several times faster than standard "fast" frameworks like Node.js See More

score 22 · Answer 12

Yesod

Top Pro

It's Fast

Top Con

Difficult learning curve

Specs

Written in:Haskell

License:MIT

Repository:https://github.com/yesodweb/yesod

Price:free

Top Pro

Haskell

Haskell code is terse, high performance, and safe. See More

It's like Java, but more Haskell-y. See More

score 42 · Answer 13

Play Framework

Top Pro

Scala

Top Con

Backward incompatibility

The jump from Play 1 to Play 2.x caused a lot of confusion. While it is important to have some kind of evolution, sometimes it causes backward incompatibility which can create some problems. It makes tutorials or modules made for the old version obsolete. This can make it hard for beginners to find useful resources. The template engine which used Groovy now uses Scala. See More

ThoughtfulPeitharchia's Experience

Very easy to use See More

Top Pro

Asynchronous Core

Top Con

Not as many resources to learn

Other languages and frameworks have countless tutorials, books, moocs, etc. Java and Play does not have nearly as much. See More

Top Pro

Interoperable with Java

Top Pro

Fast

Top Pro

Good documentation and a great community

Play has quite a large community which provides numerous tutorials and videos related to developing with Play. The Play official documentation covers many things, such as the framework itself but also specific stuff such as Akka, SBT and Netty. There are also many big companies that base their main sites around Play, one of them is LinkedIn which provides third-party documentation on a regular basis. See More

Top Pro

Play is an extensive ecosystem

Play uses Akka for concurrency, Scala for a templating engine, Netty as a client-server framework and SBT (Simple Build Tool) for building. And they all come out of the box. Play also comes with the option to scaffold your applications. Play is an all-embracing ecosystem designed to increase developer productivity and shorten development times. See More

Top Pro

Simple for beginners

Play is very simple to get started. The documentation is very helpful for beginners and advanced users alike and the official website has a great "Getting Started" tutorial to begin developing with Play. See More

Top Pro

Readable code

Play framework's convention over configuration methodology makes most Play projects have a very similar structure. This means that the code written for the framework is very readable. This enables a developer to switch between applications without having to relearn the ecosystem for every project. The built-in templating system also helps with code and makes it possible to have a very low count of lines of code. See More

Top Pro

Can use Java, one of the most widely known languages

Java is one of the most widely known languages, so people coming from that background can jump right in and not have to learn a new language syntax. See More

Top Pro

Good Websocket Support

From request to response Rocket ensures that your types mean something See More

score 11 · Answer 14

Rocket

Top Pro

Type Safe

Top Con

Nightly

Uses only nightly versions of Rust. See More

Maxwell Anderson's Experience

Rocket is my favorite choice because it is incredibly easy to get started, has great documentation, easy to use in general, much faster than other backend frameworks I've used (Node, Django), and is guaranteed to be secure on compile (no XSS attacks, etc.). See More

Specs

Written in:Rust

Top Pro

Extensible

Easily create your own primitives that any Rocket application can use See More

Top Pro

Easy To Use

Rocket makes extensive use of Rust's code generation tools to provide a clean API See More

Top Pro

Query Strings

Handling query strings and parameters is type-safe and easy in Rocket See More

Top Pro

Testing Library

Unit test your applications with ease using the built-in testing library See More

Top Pro

Templating

Rocket makes rendering templates a breeze with built-in templating support See More

Top Pro

Cookies

View, add, or remove cookies, with or without encryption, without hassle See More

Top Pro

Streams

Rocket streams all incoming and outgoing data, so size isn't a concern See More

Top Pro

Config Environments

Configure your application your way for development, staging, and production See More

Top Pro

Boilerplate Free

Spend your time writing code that really matters, and let Rocket generate the rest See More

Pyramid was designed to set up quickly and grow elegantly. See More

score 12 · Answer 15

Pyramid

Top Pro

Good for small and large projects

PhilosophicalHonos's Experience

so flexible for any kind of application. simple to complex applications. you can start a small project with it and no problem in growing it. See More

Specs

Default Template Engine:Jinja2

Default ORM:SqlAlchemy

Top Pro

Very flexible

Pyramid can be used for creating small applications quickly and easily, but it also powers up large enterprise-scale applications such as Dropbox. See More

Sayyid Hamid Mahdavi's Experience

so flexible for any kind of application. simple to complex applications. you can start a small project with it and no problem in growing it. See More

Lots of tools to create your website fast and secure. See More

score 21 · Answer 16

Yii2

Top Pro

Fast, scalable and secured

EmbiggenedMedusa's Experience

Rest API service See More

Specs

Written in:PHP

Default ORM:ActiveRecords

PHP version:5.6.0+

Price:Free

Top Pro

A lot of functionality out of the box

AwesomestShulmanu's Experience

yes it is the fast secure efficient framework that i have seen See More

Top Pro

It's fast, scalable and secured

Lots of tools to create your website fast and secure. See More

Setting up CodeIgniter is quick and easy. You can download the version you want from the CI homepage or directly pull the latest version from GitHub. After that, you unzip the contents to the directory that's required. The final step is to edit the config.php to suit your needs and it's set up and ready for development. There are also a lot of guides and tutorials from developers who have been using CI for a long time. This is because of the relative old age of the framework and the large community behind it. See More

score 31 · Answer 17

CodeIgniter

Top Pro

Beginner-friendly

Top Con

It does not have basic functions

Some of the missing features include controller security, filters in forms and modoles, rules of validation, among others. See More

Specs

Default ORM:DataMapper ORM

Default Template Engine:Custom CodeIgniter engine

PHP version:5.4.8+

Top Pro

Open source

The MIT License (MIT) CodeIgniter is open source and is distributed under the MIT license. See More

Top Con

Outdated

CodeIgniter was first released during the times of PHP 4. This means that a lot of features that were added later to PHP are not available. Some of these features are: Support for namespaces Modular separation by default Procedural function helpers While nowadays CodeIgniter can be used along the latest version of PHP, these features were not added so as not to mess with backward compatibility. They can still be used with CI, but it requires extending core files to make it work which is a waste of time and energy and requires advanced knowloedge of both PHP and CI. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

CodeIgniter has a small footprint, just 3MB and that's including the user guide. See More

Top Pro

Well documented

The documentation is clear, structured and thorough. It explains both commonly used and CodeIgniter specific concepts and always with clear examples. See More

Top Pro

CodeIgniter v4 is a complete rewrite

CI4 will be out soon & is a rewrite.. "CodeIgniter 4 is a rewrite of the framework and is not backwards compatible." So it will support ALOT more newer functionality built-in See More

Top Pro

Stable

CodeIgniter is tested by hundreds of thousands of developers that use it in production. This means that it's very hard for any bugs or problems to go unnoticed. Even when a new version is out, bugs are quickly found and patched up. See More

Top Pro

Customizable and has tons of libraries

Top Pro

Output caching

CodeIgniter lets you cache the web pages in order to decrease loading times and increase efficiency and performance. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use templating engine

CodeIgniter has its own templating engine built-in. It's based on a mustache-like templating language which is easy to learn for new developers who have never seen it. While experienced developers will feel very comfortable using it. See More

Top Pro

Active community

Because it's relatively old and well-liked, it has an active community of developers behind it. It's used by a lot of websites in production. See More

Beego's eloquent ORM is a simple and fast Object-Relational Mapping which helps with organizing the application's database. Beego examples and documentation all use the beego ORM. No need to learn to use and integrate another ORMs API. See More

score 5 · Answer 18

Beego

Top Pro

Built in ORM

Specs

License:Apache 2.0

Top Pro

Auto testing

Top Pro

No need to find and install external libraries

Beego is a "batteries included" web framework, which means that a lot of features already come out of the box. This way you don't have to spend time and find third-party libraries to integrate to the framework for most of the tasks you need to complete. See More

Top Pro

Built-in tool that watches for changes

Beego has a built-in tool which watches the code for changes. This tool (called bee tool) can be configured to run any task once the code changes. It can run tests or reload and rebuild the whole project. See More

The framework has many build-in tools, and many packages have been written targeting the framework. See More

score 46 · Answer 19

ASP.NET MVC

Top Pro

Mature

Top Con

Core and full ASP.NET are bit confusing sometimes

While not in feature parity (yet) they are still apart and support sometimes funky combinations of features - full ASP.NET has all the bells and whistles but doesn't offer cross platform so you may have to do some research what you really need. That being said, it got a lot better in 2.0. See More

Top Pro

Cross platform

.Net Core can work on any platform. See More

Top Con

Expensive

You need to have the plate to maintain a site. See More

Top Pro

Widely used

It's pretty easy to find a job with it and there's plenty of documentation and tutorials around. See More

Top Pro

Extensive documentation

There are a lot of resources available to get help. See More

Top Pro

Fast

Asp.NET Core on Linux is fast accordingly to TechEmpower benchmarks. See More

Top Pro

Asp.NET core provides balance between magic/agility and craftsmanship

You can get ordinary details quickly but with complete freedom to make your craft, knowing everything that is happening underneath the cloths. The highly modular system makes it possible to scale small applications to large ones with ease. See More

Top Pro

It has more users than any other backend web framework

Getting your next contract is easy with this on your CV. See More

Using it with gevent is a breeze. It's a WSGI app so it's easy to make it work with anything. See More

score 4 · Answer 20

Bottle

Top Pro

Async, *let friendly

Top Con

Very hard to develop projects that are not smaller than 1000 lines

While Bottle is a great framework for building small applications (generally less than 1000 lines of code), it starts getting very hard to manage your application if you want to go even a bit larger than that. The fact that it follows a single-file distribution model and that it's missing something like Flask's blueprints only make this problem worse. See More

Kaleb McKinney's Experience

I use Bottle a lot for my projects, along with cherrypy sometimes, but my experience with Bottle has been very pleasant See More

Top Pro

One of the fastest frameworks for Python

Top Pro

Flexible

Being a small one file distribution it includes almost every vital thing you need to support little websites (routing, templating). Everything else can be implemented using plugins. See More

Top Pro

Single-file distribution

Bottle works around the one-file approach, everything is done in a bottle.py file. This means that it's extremely easy to share and upload your application since it practically is just one python file. See More