When comparing Django vs Meteor, the Slant community recommends Django for most people. In the question“What are the best backend web frameworks?” Django is ranked 2nd while Meteor is ranked 34th. The most important reason people chose Django is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro ORM support out of the box
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.
Pro Top notch documentation and help from community
The official Django documentation is probably some of the best around. Well written, thorough and they explain every little detail of the framework. Django is also a very popular tool, with an extensive community and a lot of experienced developers that have been using it for years. This means that there are a lot of guides and tutorials out there for new and experienced developers alike.
Pro Highly customizable
Django is in itself a highly customizable web framework. The database, template framework and ORM can all be swapped out.
Pro Has an admin panel out of the box
Django comes with a highly customizable admin panel and authentication out of the box. This makes the development and production of a simple CMS extremely easy.
Pro Mature software with many plugins developed over the years
Django was first released in 2005, 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.
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.
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.
Pro Easy to learn
Meteor was developed with simplicity in mind, even for beginners who have just started using JavaScript frameworks. One of the reasons that beginners should start with Meteor is that Meteor is a full-stack framework, this way they can get the complete learning experience when it comes to web development (back-end and front-end development), all by using a single platform and a single language.
Furthermore, Meteor does not have complex and esoteric concepts that may be hard to grasp by a beginner, it has a clear documentation and well-established coding conventions.
There's also a very useful resource for learning Meteor in the form of a book: Discover Meteor, by the authors of many Meteor packages.
Pro Full-stack reactivity
Changes in the database will be propagated to all subscribed clients in real time, without you having to write any code.
Pro Isomorphic package system
A Meteor package can supply code for both the client and the server, and for mobile (Cordova) apps. For example, an autocomplete package supplies both server code to search a collection, and client code to display the results. The mdg:camera package supports the native camera if the app is built for mobile, or the HTML getUserMedia API to take pictures from the browser.
Pro Built-in security
Meteor takes care of many concerns with it's out-of-the-box security measures.
Pro Seamless communication between client and server
Meteor is built on top of Node.js and jQuery on the client.
Meteor enables the client and server to communicate data seamlessly, in real-time. You don't have to write any REST API or pub/sub code - Meteor takes care of it all automatically for you.
Pro Integrated front-end library
Meteor uses both your existing front-end library and it's own library called Blaze, which is integrated beautifully in the framework and fulfills the purpose of a true MV* front-end framework.
Pro Auto reload/refresh (hot code push)
Every time a change in the source file is saved, all connected clients will refresh automatically - browser tabs, mobile apps running in the simulator or on the physical device.
Or, deploy a Meteor app (meteor deploy myapp
) and all clients, plus all mobile apps with the server set to myapp.meteor.com
will automatically reload to use the code changes.
This drastically reduces the development cycle for apps in the App Store, where a regular update can wait for one to two weeks before being approved.
Pro Popular
Meteor is the 10th most starred project on GitHub and has overtaken even Rails.
Pro Support for MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis
While Meteor only supports MongoDB and Redis natively, MySQL support is on the roadmap, and there are 3rd-party packages that integrate MySQL reactively with Meteor to some extent, such as numtel:mysql. For reactive PostgreSQL support, there is numtel:pg.
Pro Real-time testing framework
Meteor also has an official testing framework called Velocity. Velocity enables real-time unit testing and integration with Jasmine or Mocha syntax. Tests are automatically run when code is saved and the testing result is indicated by a green or red dot in the upper right corner of the app.
Pro Includes latency compensation
The client will mimic instant server-side response, and updates automatically if it was different once the information is available.
Pro Mobile apps from the same code base
Meteor can generate mobile (iOS and Android) apps from the same codebase as the web app, using the Cordova (PhoneGap) library (which brings native device functionality to JavaScript applications).
Meteor-generated mobile apps are JavaScript, HTML and CSS bundles that run in a UIWebView (on iOS) or WebView (on Android). Apps can be run locally in the iOS/Android emulator, or on physical devices. You can also publish them to Google Play Store or Apple's App Store.
Moreover, these hybrid mobile apps benefit from hot code push, which dramatically accelerates the development cycle.
Pro Eliminates the need to look for a database to use
Meteor uses MongoDB, eliminating the choice among NoSQL databases. MongoDB is highly scalable - used to store petabytes of data and perform billions of operations daily at eBay, FIFA, Adobe, Craigslist, McAffee, Foursquare and others.
Pro Gets rid of Node's callbacks
Although Meteor's server side runs on top of Node.js, it manages to avoid callbacks by making use of Fibers.
Pro Extensive ecosystem
Meteor's package repository called Atmosphere has more than 5000 packages available. What's more is that Meteor can also use into the packages available for the Node ecosystem.
Pro Powerful performance monitoring tools
Meteor uses Kadira which is an excellent performance monitoring tool for Meteor apps. It profiles CPU and RAM consumption, subscription latency and throughput etc.
Pro VC-funded open-source
Bright future for Meteor - funded by venture capital and open-source.
Pro In-app debugging
The community behind Meteor has created a useful application for debugging Meteor apps that will automatically delete collections and display client-side documents, allow you to control subscriptions and lets you modify the documents.
Meteor also has great support for server-side debugging, and WebStorm has also released full support for Meteor, including debugging capabilities.
Cons
Con Can feel bloated for small projects
Django's sheer scale and functionality can feel clunky and bloated for small applications. It has too many bells and whistles which can get in the way when developing a small scale application.
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
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 hierarchal. There is no call to have anything as ridiculously flexible (and notoriously hard-to-read) as regular expressions to organize request routing.
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).
Con No native SEO support (no server-side rendering)
Meteor does not have support for server-side rendering of views, which is extremely helpful when it comes to SEO. However, there's a third-party server-side rendering package available for download. The Meteor team has also said that server-side rendering is on the roadmap.
Though lately Google has announced that the search engine can render JS and CSS files just like modern web browsers
Con Officially supports only MongoDB, which is well-known to have issues with data integrity
MongoDB advertises scalability but only if you don't care about data-integrity. There are other backend options but none of them are officially supported.
Con Requires reliable network connection
It's common for the front-end and back-end to lose sync if an internet connection is flaky. Even though the connection should be in real-time, if the connection is weak, you may lose that real-time sync. For example, in chat applications you may have to refresh the page to get the latest updated data from the server.