When comparing Flask vs Plone, the Slant community recommends Plone for most people. In the question“What are the best Python based CMSs?” Plone is ranked 5th while Flask is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Plone is:
Not only does this provides complete transparency to the user, it also enables a large base of developers to work simultaneously on solving any arising the issues and improving the platform.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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"
Pro Open source
Not only does this provides complete transparency to the user, it also enables a large base of developers to work simultaneously on solving any arising the issues and improving the platform.
Pro Remarkable level of security
Plone has been around for almost two decates and to date less than 50 vulnerabilities were discovered in the platform. That's at least ten times less than any of the popular alternatives, including Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla. In fact, government agencies, such as NASA and FBI use Plone for its high level of security.
Pro Can run on virtually anything
Plone runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, Chromebooks, RaspberryPi, servers, and cloud services.
Pro Multilingual UI and documentation
Plone platform along with all documentation is available in more than 40 languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Cons
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