When comparing Mezzanine vs Flask, the Slant community recommends Mezzanine for most people. In the question“What are the best Python based CMSs?” Mezzanine is ranked 3rd while Flask is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Mezzanine is:
Mezzanine has a built-in search engine and API, integration with services like Disqus, Gravatar, Google Analytics, Twitter, bit.ly, Akismet, a blog and a good selection of templates available out of the box.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Ready to use out of the box
Mezzanine has a built-in search engine and API, integration with services like Disqus, Gravatar, Google Analytics, Twitter, bit.ly, Akismet, a blog and a good selection of templates available out of the box.
Pro Frontend editing
Editing of blog posts or themes and widgets can be done on the frontend as long as the user is logged in with an Admin account. This make Mezzanine very easy to use and manage even for people who may not be experienced at all in programming.
Pro Blog and shopping module mezzanine cartridge integration
Pro Popular and has an active community
Mezzanine is a very well-maintained CMS. It is very popular and has a nice and helpful community around it. This means that there's help available for any problem that you may face with it.
Pro Minimalist without losing power
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.
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.
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.
Pro Very flexible
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.
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.
Pro Able to use ORM or "true SQL"
Cons
Con No support for scheduled publishing
With Mezzanine you cannot schedule future blog posts or changes to be posted at a particular time.
Con Not async-friendly
Flask is explicitly not designed to handle async programming.
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.
Con Threadlocals and globals used everywhere
The default way of creating applications in flask makes it hard to use reusable and clean code.
Con HTML-oriented, not API-oriented
Not necessarily designed for making APIs, though that is possible